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Am Montag, 23. November 2020, 22:32:40 CET schrieb Matěj Cepl:
Goal of the Linux distribution is not only to be as large as possible, but also to keep high quality of its packages. If we throw quality of packages to anonymous (and not permanent) volunteer contributors, quality will suffer quickly.
Hi Matej, fundamentally, you're saying "outdated" == "low quality". and that is not always the case. I would argue in some cases the "lets get rid of nose and drop unittest2" changes that ended up creating hundreds of downstream patches everywhere, some of them never going upstream or are submitted upstream but failing there (or having patch conflicts meanwhile) did not *improve* quality either. I'm not against such efforts per se, but doing those downstream first and never following up on getting them upstream makes life just miserable for everyone else at very little value achieved. For me quality is: "it works and is secure". There are soft quality factors, like "is recent, is performant", but those are a clear 2nd factor over "it works" and "is secure". so if we have a particular thing that is having vulnerabilities, there is no doubt that it should be fixed (updated, patch added) or dropped. So how about we draft a policy around the actual goals rather than having a unrelated discussion ("you can only add a package if you have a business reason"). Also, IMHO openSUSE is not really "large" by any means. I'd say it is by far the smallest of the popular distros, so instead of coming up with policies on our own we maybe should also learn about how others that are larger are managing that (I haven't really educated myself on that either, so I can't point it out directly, sorry).
a) That is not how OpenSUSE (especially around Python) has been working … we all help to maintain each others packages, or even better ownership of packages is not much considered. You are suggesting quite radical change, a way more radical than what I am suggesting. And I am strongly against it (experienced this organization in two distros and it was always mess which had to be worked around all the time).
In my observation, the python packaging has also always done things in a way that make things extremly painful. or in another way of stating it, it sometimes appeared like you intentionally want to hit all the obstacles on the way.
b) We don’t have enough tools to monitor quality of packaging by others. I am afraid that the reaction of users on broken packages is not filing bugs on bugzilla (nobody files bugs there), but either switching to Ubuntu or using pip directly, which means even less testing for our packages.
BTW, attached is the screenshot of my current queue of the review of submission requests, and it is pretty normal. Everybody throws new packages to d:l:p and not many actually maintain them.
As far as I remember in this mailthread, noone was against a policy of dropping unmaintained(unmaintainable) stuff. Lets just work on a refresher on the original policy draft proposal addressing also the feedback you got. Greetings, Dirk