On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 19:12 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote: > Kevin Fenzi wrote: > > Keeping packages around with no maintainers or people handling their > > bugs is poor for everyone. > > Why? If I, as a user, really need a certain piece of software, I'd rather > have an unmaintained package than none at all! Worst case, I can't use the > package at all, in which case I'm still no worse off than with no package at > all! I disagree. The existence of a package triggers certain assumptions: the package will be maintained and keep working. That's the point of there *being* a package, after all. So if there's a package for something, I don't check for security updates for that 'something' myself. I figure the packager is doing that for me. So if I wind up with an unmaintained package installed, my security has just been reduced. > (And now with my packager hat on, fixing and/or updating a package in > the repo also requires less effort than unretiring a package which got > removed.) This is an important point: I think it would be much less of a problem to retire packages if the process for unretiring them were not so painful. I _do_ think the unretiring process is an excellent example of unnecessary bureaucracy (as is the renaming process, good lord, what a PITA). Those two things could stand to be trimmed down. At least to 'if you're a provenpackager (or even just a sponsored packager) you can unretire a package without any obstacles'. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
