[Mageia-dev] Package adoption campaign, 3 months later

[Maarten Vanraes]

Op woensdag 14 december 2011 23:19:40 schreef Michael Scherer:
> Le samedi 10 décembre 2011 à 12:14 +0100, Samuel Verschelde a écrit :
> > You're explaining why having orphan packages is bad and it's hard to
> > disagree, but I fail to see why such a mailing list for people who are
> > ready to devote some time to orphan packages would make things worse.
> > It's not because it's not the ideal solution that it's bad, is it?
> 
> Because such a mailling list would just incite people to add package and
> never remove them, because "that's not really unmaintained, that's
> collectively maintained". Which is just a non sense.

like mysql

> That's how it was in Mandriva, so the proposition is just not helping.
> 
> Each time a cleaning was attempted, someone said "but come on, we are
> taking care of it collectively, so you cannot remove, it could still
> help". And so almost nothing was removed.
> 
> I see no reason to think it will be different. Same situation, same
> spirit, same users, same outcome.
> 
> Either people agree that we should have no orphans, and then the list is
> useless, or they think we should keep orphans, and then this is causing
> issues. Middle ground ( like "let's keep orphan for X months" ) are just
> a variation of the first one, and so we would just be discussing the
> duration.

imho this mailing list is only good to notify other of maintainer who aren't 
active with their package, and to let people see: "oops, this one is 
unmaintained, but i need it, so i'll maintain it."

so imo it should contain information: maintainership (if any), # bugs, perhaps 
even other packages that require or buildrequire it...

i think this mailing list would be good, (not only for having no maintainer)

> So let's try to make a proposal, if there is a list, after how many
> months should a package be removed from the repository if not maintained
> ( and by maintained, I do not say "not changes or anything", I really
> mean "no one listed as maintainer" ) ?

otoh, this is difficult, eg: 

mysql have no maintainer atm
i want to provide mariadb as alternative, and be maintainer of that. (and drop 
mysql)

but a convergence time is required, imho.

so, i would say, packages could be dropped if no maintainer is set for 3 
months unless someone is doing the work to get this dropped as a result of 
something else.

agreed?