Hi people,
I think we should remove some of the older orphaned packages from the
unstable archive (woody). No, not from frozen - we kept them this long, we
can keep them for this release. Richard Braakman (the release manager) told
me he agrees.
The point is, they have been orphaned for too long, and it appears nobody
wants them enough to adopt them... it someone appears to want them now, they
can pick them up from project/orphaned directory on any Debian FTP mirror.
Also, the QA people really have better things to do than to keep fixing some
old and probably forgotten packages, please understand that.
Here is an excerpt from WNPP's orphaned packages list, I'm including some
interesting (read: really old) entries:
* By Debian Quality Assurance Group (debian-qa@lists.debian.org):
(612 Days Orphaned)
xmailtool -- The good old BSD style mail reader
(446 Days Orphaned)
asa -- convert ASA (Fortran) carriage control characters
(372 Days Orphaned)
ppd-gs -- PostScript printer description files for
GhostScript
(367 Days Orphaned)
imgstar -- IMG* Image Toolset and C Library (non-free)
wily -- Work-alike of the Acme environment for Plan 9
(350 Days Orphaned)
macutils - for specially encoded Mac OS files
I think we can all agree they can be removed, now.
Here are more suggestions for removal, this is also sent to respective old
maintainers:
* By Federico Di Gregorio ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
(612 Days Orphaned)
tkstep4.2 -- The NEXTSTEP(tm)-like version of the Tk toolkit
The 8.0 version also exists, and it has been recently adopted by Steve
Kostecke, apparently.
* By Igor Grobman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
(418 Days Orphaned)
circus
xirc
circus is non-free, without source. There exists a newer version, but even
after 25K of patching (those reading who helped me will remember the pain),
I couldn't compile it :<
xirc is contrib, and also, depends on qt1g and libstdc++2.8.
* By Hugo Haas ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
(175 Days Orphaned)
iplogger
ippl replaces this completely, IIRC.
* By Christoph Lameter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
(612 Days Orphaned)
mserver -- Network Modem Server
optimizer -- Assembler Code optimizer for MMX, PPro and
Pentium (non-free)
shaper -- Traffic shaper for 2.1.x kernels
sharefont -- Shareware font selection for X11 (non-free)
smb-nat -- SMB Network Analysis Tool
Almost two years... ugh :) Christoph returned to Debian work long ago, but
these packages haven't been updated recently (only shaper, updated for 2.2
kernel).
* By Michael Meskes ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
(537 Days Orphaned)
umsdos -- UMSDOS file system utilities
It seems Michael has done uploads not so long ago... maybe this is an error
in WNPP list?
That's it, thanks for your patience :)
Please CC: me on any replies.
--
enJoy -*/\*- don't even try to pronounce my first name
