Should we require each source package in Debian to be uploaded at least once per release cycle?
Lintian[0] reports that there are currently over 7000 packages with an ancient Standards-Version. That's a lot of packages. Some of those haven't been uploaded in years. That means that the packages haven't had attention by their maintainer (or an NMUer) in years. Sometimes that's OK: there's nothing that needs changing in the package, and upstream is dormant. However, it seems to me that without inspecting each package manually, we can't know if fixes are needed. It would seems to me that having an automated way of verifying that a package gets at least minimal attention would be good for Debian. I propose we implement that by requiring that each package gets uploaded at least once per release cycle, and that the upload updates the package to match current policy, indicated by updating the Standards-Version field to one that is not ancient. In more detail, I propose the following: * When the release freeze begins, every package in testing must have a Standards-Version that is less than 24 months old (the threshold for the ancient-standards-version warning in lintian), and will be removed from testing. * Six months before the freeze, RC bugs get filed for any packages that have the ancient-standards-version lintian warning. This would leave ample time to fix the problem for any one package. [0]: https://lintian.debian.org/tags/ancient-standards-version.html -- I want to build worthwhile things that might last. --joeyh
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