On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 1:32 AM, Matt McCutchen <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 14:17 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote: >> >> When software is packaged it's reasonable to expect that someone, >> somewhere, uses it; if they don't, it probably shouldn't be packaged. We >> need to find those people and engage them in the testing process, and it >> seems to me that the maintainers of packages are as well placed as >> anyone to help find and engage their users in this process. > > The argument sounds reasonable on its face, but apparently some (many?) > maintainers don't agree. Pestering them does not seem to be helpful. > We have the option to take away their ownership of the package, > potentially resulting in it getting dropped from the distribution if > another maintainer can't be found, but again we have to ask whether the > benefits outweigh the costs. I don't agree with the "packages all should have current users" posit. Volunteers tend to "scratch their own itches". So a maintainer may very well be at some point in time one of the very few, if not the only, user of a package. In this case, I think removing the package forcibly from Fedora would be harmful because it could possibly discourage contributors and damage our capabilities to "bring" upstream to users. Of course, we could look at things differently: for a package to be marked critpath, it should have users or be a dependency of some other package with users. And packages with enough known users should always land in critpath, otherwise we might break systems users depend on. At this point, non-critpath packages may be left to their maintainers' wishes. FranÃois -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
