Proposal: unmaintained.release file in CVS

Jason L Tibbitts III tibbs at math.uh.edu
Mon Aug 28 04:06:13 UTC 2006


One issue that has come up repeatedly is deciding when someone should
step up to do work on a package in the absence of maintainer action.
Some (perhaps most) maintainers don't want to maintain their packages
for Fedora releases that have been passed to Legacy, yet the various
people who may still be interested in these packages (especially the
security team) have no way to know if the maintainer is still
maintaining a release or not.

So I propose that we indicate this in some manner.  In the absence of
a package database which will of course give us that ability, I
propose simply adding a file named "unmaintained.release" to CVS in
the same manner as the "needs.rebuild" file.

Alternately, we can invert the expectations and require that packagers
add a "maintained.release" file to CVS to indicate that old releases
are still maintained.  I think that this is less optimal than
specifically indicating that a release is unmaintained, but it has the
property of releases automatically being unmaintained if there is no
maintainer action which may better meet expectations.  We could also
get this behavior by automatically adding the "unmaintained.release"
file when a release goes to Legacy.

 - J<




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