On Wednesday 31 July 2013 13:36:31 Dominique Leuenberger a.k.a. Dimstar wrote:
Quoting Jos Poortvliet
: On Wednesday 31 July 2013 04:42:29 Marguerite Su wrote:
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Stephan Kulow
wrote: d) Too few people actually care and fix problems of importance
Coolo has made some improvements in the past: he emails us/our mailing lists.
But a lot of packagers are just hit-and-run people. They don't even join the ML. They don't even read coolo's email. They just think: anyway I submit the package, it should be your responsibility to maintain it.
That's bad. We're the distribution which has the most packages, while we're also the distribution which has the most unmaintained packages.
Perhaps, at least, we could improve the integrated automated tests to make sure that pushing things that break other things will simply be impossible... Careful with this idea: an orphaned package could stop any kind of evolution happening.
Think about stuff that breaks with a new compiler where nobody really cares for; we could a) not push the new compiler, as it 'breaks' other stuff b) drop the stuff that breaks
Now of course, none of the two variants can be blindly applied at any moment (or we would have lost zypper with the update to gcc 4.7 :) )
means of identifying 'orphaned' packages are much more important here in my opinion... each package has a maintainer assigned, no? Are those maintainers 'still around'? Do they still care for the package?
Might be worthy to come up with a list of 'potentially orphaned packages', contact the respective maintainers, if no reply, 'put it up for grab or delete it'.
True, there is an issue there. But to some extend, the rings Coolo talked about can help here, I suppose... Packages in Ring 0 or 1 shouldn't be broken and should always be maintained or something like that?!?
Dominique