Am 10.12.2015 um 20:02 schrieb Martin Pluskal:
Hi
I have noticed that lately, that there appeared bunch of deleterequests for factory: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/346128 (agg) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/346107 (tokyocabinet) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/346098 (pth) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/347667 (ipw-firmware) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/347654 (pangox-compat) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/347780 (libfallocate) https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/348262 (tclap)
While some of them indeed seem indeed valid, there are several cases where which are questionable - is inactive upstream for package that is building properly, and lack of dependencies sufficient reason for removal from factory?
Certainly not. Inactive upstream is often just a sign of well engineered software, which works for many years without continuous bugfixing and which is feature complete. Something the CADT crowd of today probably just cannot imagine anymore.
I would like to mention here, that from my own experience, as maintainer and user of some benchmarking tools, it is not uncommon that upstream is inactive for many years yet package is still useful and successfully used.
Exactly.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
One example -- ipw-firmware. Just because the driver has been merged into the kernel a long time ago does not necessarily mean that it's suddenly able to run without firmware. Now it may be that actually the ipw2200 firmware is included in kernel-firmware nowadays, but this certainly needs to be verified and tested by someone with the hardware at hand. One more note: "...and nothing else depends on it" would be a proper reason to drop everything. Because when whe start dropping packages from the fringe parts, suddenly we'll find that nothing depends on Web browsers and desktop environments and we can drop them, too! Next step is the X server. And all server services, if nothing else depends on them etc... finally we can get rid of *all* packages -- will be a so much cleaner and leaner distribution, won't it? As long as a package is not obviously broken (does not work or even build all, or has massive know security flaws) it is only the maintainers job to drop it. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org