Am Donnerstag 10 September 2009 schrieb Takashi Iwai:
That's true - but then at least the bug doesn't belong only to the package maintainer but all project maintainers. And, OBS packages are basically non-official unless they are on FACTORY. So, if you have any problems, it's free to drop immediately at worst. That's why dropping from FACTORY can be a "safer" option for orphaned packages.
While it's certainly true, it's clearly not so black & white. I still find it acceptable closing bugs as WONTFIX with the comment that you have no time to fix it and the suggestion to take over maintenance if cared for. Of course we shouldn't put such packages on the DVD - and I need to go through your list checking :)
For those old ones that "can be dropped", I would prefer to see them really dropped if there is no user of it that is able to maintain it. But for things that are really adding value to the distribution I don't want to see them dropped _NOW_ because noone stepped up for 3 days.
Don't worry, maybe the target to drop will be 11.3, judging from the timeline. As I mentioned, the post was a sort of provocation :)
Well, the problem is provocation as such won't help - it won't generate volunteers. Dropping the package might indeed generate volunteers, just as we have a vpnc package maintainer now again that's using it too :)
But, the questions regarding the package maintainer is still quite open. One typical example is M17N repo. Since Mike left, we have no people working on this area. So I eventually volunteered to fix / improve the issues. But, if really no one takes care any more?
I'm very well aware and openSUSE users will have to decide if it's worth to keep it alive or concentrate on scim and xemacs. Some packages in there are really outdated and noone really knows who is using them (and not even Mike knows about all of them I'm sure :) - I don't think we should have such packages. And if there are packages that are used by people and buggy, _then_ we need to convince these people to pick 'em. And yes, that "people" includes Novell managers - if anyway wants M17N packages fixed, he needs to find a way to get it fixed. But the whole "Novell does not control all of factory" concept is pretty new, so I would give it some more time to settle before claiming failure. But again: we still need a way to evaluate if a package should be dropped, I'm just claiming that _now_ is a bad time for that :)
The situation of maintenance isn't so trivial right now in many areas; even though many packages are even on SLES. This is my honest and serious concern...
Mine too, but we have way too many packages around to always have an active maintainer for them. So some staleness we will always have to live with. I got notified that my package would be removed from debian only after leaving it alone for 8 years - so even debian removes packages ;) Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org