Hi, Christian Kastner writes: > Example #1: Orphaned/RFA'd packages > ~~~~~~~~~~~ > Orphaned packages are packages that, by definition, no one is interested > in maintaining. There are no volunteers willing to commit to them. > > However, some of these packages are important to the Debian ecosystem. > For example, schroot is a key package for our infrastructure and for > many contributors, yet it's been orphaned since 2018. Other orphaned > packages are less visible directly, but may have dozens of affected > reverse dependencies.
I'm not a DPL candidate, but I don't think the solution is to pay people to work on such packages. Instead we should migrate away from them where possible. For example instead of schroot, we should move to some alternative container solution such as Docker, podman, systemd-nspawn, ... In some cases maybe even throw-away VMs instead of throw-away containers (e.g. for buildds). Another example is anacron (migrate to systemd timer units?). Of course this isn't always possible; for example I don't think we can easily remove/replace autoconf (as another QA Group-maintained package installed on my laptop). Ansgar
