On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 12:37:30PM -0800, Britton wrote:
>
> How hard or unreasonable would it be to make it easy for users to sign up
> for some sort of automated notification system which would keep them
> informed about the status of packages they use? If I were a completely
> pragmatic user, I would want something like this:
>
> 1. To run stable.
> 2. To be informed if a package I use regularly has some_number of RC
> bugs open in unstable for some_amount_of_time.
> 3. To be informed if a package gets orphaned upstream, or (more
gv is orphaned upstream since 6 years, cron is orphaned upstream since
9 years.
> feasibly and probably more importantly) at the debian level.
MIA maintainers are a bigger problem than orphaned packages.
> 4. Possibly to be informed if a package I use hasn't been updated
> upstream and/or in debian for a long time.
>
> This would be useful information for making choices and plans, and
> acquiring it by hand can be a bit painful.
>
> Debian developers are uniquely situated to help users navigate and select
> amoung the tens of thousands of packages now available. All we would need
> to do is expose some selected bits of our existing infrastructure in a
> collected, readable form. We could simultaneously serve our users and
> address the fact that at some point, we're going to have to jettison
> packages that people are using (fair warning will make this less painful).
>...
It doesn't help the non-hackers among your users.
Typical example scenario:
- several new computers for a lab at university
- some printers
- a new scanner
- a CD burner
- some already-bought laptops
All the users want to do in this situations is to:
- a distribution that supports all the hardware they have
- install the computers once
- get regular security updates
These people are definitely not interested in tracking which maintainers
are MIA or things like that.
> Britton Kerin
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
