Paul wrote:
Hi,
He said that is up to the debian developer as to how long they want to
maintain the package. He went on to say that as long as the application
function and was free from release critical bugs, then debian will
continue to ship it. He also said, that if a upstream vendor is not
maintaining the application anymore (or seems not to be) then its up to
the packager to fix bugs etc.
I am not sure if other agree on that approach or not.
No. I'm not in favour of this approach. IMO, it's actually what has kept
Debian back as a distro. They have *way* too much legacy hanging around
them which makes build times and build sizes insanely huge. I know I've
fixed bugs on a few packages I package for FE on z88dk (especially) and
have submitted them to the authors. However, doing this then starts to
eat into other work.
Sure it's fun, but is it worth it - especially if the upstream
maintainer has dropped the package?
Agreed. I only asked him to find a grounding for what others are doing.
How long without a release till considered inactive?
You can't. I know of quite a few packages that are stable. z88dk and
fuse-emulator are stable and it's been a while since the main branches
have been updated. Neither though are inactive.
Right. Perhaps time is a poor measurement of a projects status? Perhaps
some other measurement should be made for determining this.
Hard one. You can't go on version number or time. Possible answer is if
there is a development branch, if that's dead then the package is
possibly/probably dead.
Perhaps failed attempts to contact the lead dev or any other dev too?
I think all reasonable efforts should be made to contact and confirm the
status of a project.
That said, there has to be a certain degree of discretion on the
packagers side (or potential packager). If a package is unmaintained
upstream, but remains bug free and useful, then why should its package
maintenance change?
Why Orphane a package that is considered EOL?
Some packages, though EOL, should be kept purely on the merit of how
good they are.
My point was more, why orphan it if the general consensus is to drop it?
Should it not be placed in a "dropped" list or something?
Again. lends weight to my point about the FL branch. If it's dropped
into Legacy and you want to bring it back to a current branch, that's
not a problem, but if it's in Legacy it can be effectively considered
dropped.
Then we need an orphaned list and a legacy list.
orphaned = maintainable, but with out a maintainer
legacy = unmaintainable and with out a maintainer
Grouping them together just leads to people offering to take ownership
of a package that nobody wants maintained ;)
I know FE as it stands does not have a policy on this, perhaps its worth
knocking out some overall guidelines for the wiki?
Sounds like a cunning plan!
Indeed and useful to I would think
Couldn't agree more. Can anyone who has a FE account set up a page?
I can do this.
If there is also no objection, perhaps we can start a legacy packages
page also, to house unmaintainable packages?
Michael
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