Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
The reason why I think that moving some of the orphaned packages to
experimental is a good idea, is because often, you run into packages
that are still useful to a small number of users, have no alternative,
still basically work, but have been orphaned for >2 years with nobody
willing to maintain them. In that case, we should not release with such
packages, but it should still be available (though unsupported) to the
users.
What is experimental about these packages? Experimental has a purpose.
It is not keeping unsupported packages around.
The packages are still on archive.d.o if they ever made a release (and
soon more finely grained on snapshots). The typical package did not get
nontrivial updates in a release cycle before it was removed, so the
version on archive.d.o will be just as good as the version you want to
stuff into experimental.
If the users who still derive benefit from the package do not want to
maintain it, tough luck. Free software works relies on people helping out.
I cannot see how turning experimental "maintained packages that can use
a test drive before general consumption" into "pile of broken, obsolete
packages nobody ever wants to see again" is something that benefits
Debian at large. In addition, I cannot see how users without means to
obtain the package from archive.d.o or some snapshot repository can
responsibly be pointed at experimental as a source of packages.
The same people who do not help out maintaining would also be less
likely to file bugs. Leaving experimental essentially as a dump where
packages rot without ever seeing any attention. Eventually experimental
will become as useless as sourceforge as a source of working software.
Improving Debian? Only if your only measure is number of packages,
probably. Other than that? No.
Please do not turn Debian into "Pile of Packages" as opposed to
"operating system" more than it already is.
Kind regards
T.
P.S.: Of course, a lot time might be freed if Debian QA didn't
effectively maintain half of the non-orphaned packages as well when it
comes to fixing bugs. But as things are like they are....
--
Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/
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