package EOL

Michael Schwendt bugs.michael at gmx.net
Tue Apr 25 23:40:24 UTC 2006


On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:35:14 +1200, Michael J. Knox wrote:

> So, my offering to unorphane Sodipodi seems to have raised a couple of 
> good questions.
> 
> When should a package be removed and considered no longer maintainable?
> 
> How long without a release till considered inactive?
> 
> What lengths should someone go to, to confirm a project status?
> 
> Why Orphane a package that is considered EOL?
> 
> I know FE as it stands does not have a policy on this, perhaps its worth 
> knocking out some overall guidelines for the wiki?
> 
> Thoughts?

I'm afraid I misunderstand several of your questions. So, one by one:

Package "sodipodi" has not been built since FC-3. It is not clear when
exactly its original maintainer orphaned all his packages. However, he
stopped working on sodipodi in favour of inkscape (which had started as a
fork of sodipodi and has been more active/successful since then -- last
release of sodipodi is over two years old).

Every package in Fedora Extras, i.e. every package with binaries published
in the repository, must have at least one maintainer listed in the
owners.list file.

So far, policies about orphans have been lax or non-existent as to give
potential contributors the opportunity to evaluate orphans and pick them
up more easily. However, I think the time has come to delete orphans from
the repository more regularly and in accordance with a well-defined
policy. Else the list of orphans will grow as we continue in "devel" and
old orphans exist only in the old branches. I'm a proponent of the
all-or-nothing strategy: orphaned binaries are deleted from all active
(i.e. still supported branches). Once a new maintainer is found, he
could update and publish new builds.




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