On Wed Dec 11, 2024 at 10:57 PM GMT, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
I'd like to discuss this with a focus on general principles, and only discuss specifics (adequate, golang) to the extent that it helps reason about general principles.
That's going to be pretty hard, because the scenario you present is still pretty specific.
so we have a qa testing package that was written 11y ago in perl, and has been orphaned for almost all of that time (10y!). it's not critical but it does serve a purpose, and it's therefore nonideal that it's been orphaned for so long.
Certainly non-ideal. "Orphaned" does not give the full picture about the state of the package, however: It could describe a package with critical bugs that aren't getting fixed, or nobody doing any QA or NMU uploads of it ever. Neither looks true for adequate.
someone takes it over and rewrites it in a language that runs in all supported arches, and likely in many ports too as long as they keep up with a relatively recent version of the language (in this case, a version released 1.5y ago).
"likely in many ports too" is dancing around the fact that it *doesn't* run on at least one port, hence Holger's complaint.
An orphaned/unmaintained-but-functional package was still serving some purpose and was available, and by uploading a rewrite in Go, it became unavailable. That is a shame (how significant this is, is up for debate)
If you'd chosen to upload "adequate-ng" instead, this wouldn't have happened, although, there would be plenty of drawbacks to that too.
We're discussing the drawbacks of what you did, but I must acknowledge the benefits too: you've adopted a package, following the correct procedures, and (in many other respects) improved it. Thanks!
You also made an effort to reach out to users and stakeholders before you took the action, which was a good idea.
on a meta level: I find it incredible that this conversation needs to be had at all, given the increasing median age of Debian contributors, and the limited popularity of perl among younger people
The "Perl Problem" is a wider issue we should explore in much more depth. I'm personally a little surprised if it's true that younger people are unprepared to take a stab at hacking Perl. But since that's the case, we have deeply embedded, critical stuff written in Perl everywhere. "adequate" is but the tip of the iceberg.
-- Please do not CC me for listmail. 👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland ✎ j...@debian.org 🔗 https://jmtd.net
