On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 02:02:39PM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > And how do we balance the work it takes for those doing QA on those > packages (for whatever reason) versus the value mentioned by Paul? As > mentioned so often, popcon has it's value, but is definitely not the answer.
We have several kinds of orphaned packages, eg. at least the distinction between "commonly used" (I'd say syslinux, docbook and sgml-base are examples of those), "not so commonly used but having a user base which cares" (eg sysvinit) and all the rest. I don't think it makes sense to treat this different kinds of orphaned packages the same and I don't think anybody does, though I don't see this reflected in this threat yet… (and FWIW+btw I'm glad we have popcon data, as incomplete as it might be, it's one of the view data points we have about package usage.) Maaaaaybe a solution would be a third kind of maintainer/uploader, so people could indicate that they are happy to do house-cleaning work on this package, even though they are not apt to maintain it properly. Maintainers: debian...@lists.debian.org House-cleaners: f...@example.org Once we have this we could be more agressive about removing packages with low popcon scores (below a to be defined threshold) from sid automatically - and not do that if House-cleaners is set. Looking at the output of wnpp-alert on my system there are a few packages where I would step up and do some work to prevent removal from Debian but which I cannot sensibly commit to maintain properly. -- cheers, Holger
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