On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 04:24:02PM -0400, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > OK this is the most frustrating of a TON of frustrating parts of this > conversation. > > 1. WHY DO WE SHIP PACKAGES THAT WE 'KNOW' AREN'T MAINTAINED? > 2. Why are people 'maintainers' of such packages if they know upstream > is dead and they aren't going to maintain things. > 3. If someone isn't going to read the bugzillas why do we even have > them in bugzilla or the distribution? Because: (a) The maintenance status of a package is not a binary variable. It is easy to imagine a third state - weakly maintained. (b) The maintenance activity can ebb and flow. (c) Just because a package is unmaintained and has unattended bugs, it doesn't mean that it isn't working in the majority of cases. Sometimes I own a package (let's say) FOO simply because it is in the dependency chain of something else that I am actively interested in. At some point in the past, FOO was actively maintained, but that changed over time. Now, I see the bugs accumulate, and every once in a couple of cycles when I get some free time I try to go through some of them. Sometimes somebody else steps up. And if we are lucky, then things might again pick up in the future. Yes, strictly speaking, we should remove FOO but that is often not practical unless the functionality offered by FOO is not interesting anymore, or there is a suitable replacement. Even if there is a replacement, it might take a while to do the port (webkitgtk3/WebKit1 comes to mind).
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