On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 at 12:23:39 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
I find that the Uploaders field becomes more important, not less, for
team-maintained packages compared to solo-maintained packages. An
example is how to recognize if a package is obsolete and best dropped
from Debian
I am amused by the contrast between this and what happens in teams like
GNOME, where we have dead packages whose uploaders specifically don't
want them in the distribution, which we have been trying to remove for
in some cases several years, but because the package still has rdeps it
cannot be removed - and as long as it cannot be removed, the GNOME team
feel that we have to be the ones keeping it on life-support, so that we
can at least make use of knowledge from other related packages.
Another reason why we keep the team as the maintainer for these
packages, rather than orphaning them, is to make sure that we can be the
ones asking for their removal when it becomes possible - and to try to
avoid situations like #888670 where a formerly-core, formerly-GNOME
package is long-dead upstream, should probably be removed, and certainly
shouldn't be advertised to GNOME users as something that is
well-integrated or recommended, but because someone outside the team
claims to have adopted it, the GNOME team no longer has control over its
status or the authority to remove it.
I'm sure the Qt/KDE team has plenty of packages from the pre-Qt-6 era
that they feel similarly about (although for whatever reason they seem
to have been more successful at getting old versions of Qt actually
removed), and similar for other large teams.
It would be nice if we had a representation for "this package is
unmaintained and we recommend removing it if possible, but if an upload is
urgently needed, the GNOME team is the maintainer of last resort". We
could put that on GTK 2, caribou, clutter-1.0, cogl, gtksourceview3,
glade and all their relatives (see also
https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=pkg-gnome-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&tag=oldlibs
).
Perhaps Maintainer: debian-qa, Uploaders: pkg-gnome-maintainers would be
a good representation for that situation?
I like the
rule that is (or was, when I was part of it) upheld in the multimedia
team, that any team-maintained package need at least two uploaders - if
you care in particular for a package, then add yourself as uploader, and
when you stop caring then remove yourself - then it becomes easy to
notice when a package has lost interest within the team
I don't think there is really anyone who feels personally responsible
for, for example, gnome-calculator, kmahjongg or libnotify - but they're
part of the desktop environment, so if we as a distribution want to be
shipping a complete GNOME environment and a complete KDE environment,
*someone* has to upload them. I think it's unrealistic to expect that
every package will have an enthusiastic maintainer (let alone two), many
packages are only here because they're required by something more
interesting.
smcv
