Il giorno mer, 02/02/2011 alle 01.33 +, Matt Turner ha scritto:
>
> Maybe you did this already, but it seems like the amount of time spent
> masking a package could have been spent poking whoever is supposed to
> be maintaining it (Alin Năstac
>
I can't obviously speak for Alin, but I'd like to point out one
particular issue here: Alin has been maintaining for a long time the
whole net-dialup herd alone, and has been doing a very good job,
considering the amount of different packages in that.
On the other hand, packages that require specific hardware to be tested
cannot really be maintained by developers that don't have them (any
longer). What does that mean? Mostly it means that a lot of packages for
hardware devices that are no longer commonly used (such as softmodems)
cannot be easily kept up-to-date, unless we have people using them on a
daily basis who can step up to maintain them.
Furthermore, for the packages that are implemented in kernel-space or
mixed in kernel- and user-space, each kernel version will be a further
problem.
This said, I'd suggest users and developers alike to add themselves (or
ask to be added) to the metadata.xml files for packages requiring
specific hardware support, so that even if one maintainer ends up not
being active, we have a list of people who can actually tell us whether
a given package works or not.
And don't simply avoid doing so because there is someone else on that
list already; we don't have a limit of one, two or three people listed
in metadata.xml. The more people we know are ready to test a given
package on actual hardware, the better (and you can be listed as "just a
tester" after all).
--
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/
