package EOL
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Apr 26 16:24:48 UTC 2006
Michael Schwendt <bugs.michael at ...> writes:
> 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.
I don't see how deleting the packages is helpful from a user point of view.
>From what I've noticed when this was done at FC5 release time, it does give an
incentive for people who need the packages to maintain them, but it also
introduces holes in the availability of packages which aren't needed
(especially if you delete a package such as cgoban which had just been rebuilt
for FC5 and where the rebuilder offered to take up maintainance - there was
some lack of communication in that particular case, it has been taken up and
rebuilt again since, but it was unavailable for a few days for no good reason).
If the package still works and doesn't have known security holes, it doesn't
absolutely require an update, so having nobody to do such an update isn't
critical in that situation. (It's bad if there's upstream updates available and
not pushed to Extras, but IMHO not critical enough to warrant deleting the
package.)
Just my 2 cents,
Kevin Kofler
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