From my naive perspective this package caused some work from a quitebusy maintainer for no obvious user base. May be I'm wrong in this
...
I'm not sure whether there are any PalmPilot devices out there. At
least the actual *votes* in popcon[1] is down to zero now.
The package
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years. It received an NMU by Adrian Bunk (in CC as well):
[2022-01-02] imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch) [2021-12-27] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 (source) into unstable (Adrian Bunk) [2011-02-23] imgvtopgm 2.0-9 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch) [2011-02-13] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9 (source i386) (signed by: Erik Schanze)
The changelog of that NMU was:
* Non-maintainer upload.
* debian/rules: Add build-{arch,indep}. (Closes: #999003)
From my naive perspective this package caused some work from a quitebusy maintainer for no obvious user base. May be I'm wrong in this
specific case but this observation raises my question: Do we have any
means to get rid of packages that should be rather removed from the distribution than draining resources.
If the answer is no should we possibly use the list of packages that are
not topic of the heated debate around the source format 1.0 (where maintainers are obviously are caring about their packages just disagree
with format 3.0 format) to pick some packages that should be rather
removed than fixed?
Kind regards
Andreas.
...
On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 02:11:09PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
...
I'm not sure whether there are any PalmPilot devices out there. At
least the actual *votes* in popcon[1] is down to zero now.
This is less convincing than it sounds, since popcon data is based only
on a tiny and non-representative fraction of our users.
You cannot claim a package is unused solely based on popcon data.
Debian Med also has packages with zero popcon votes, users of software
for exotic/ancient hardware or uncommon usecases (like Debian Med) are
not generating high popcon numbers.
The package
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years. It received an NMU by Adrian Bunk (in CC as well):
[2022-01-02] imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch) [2021-12-27] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 (source) into unstable (Adrian Bunk)
[2011-02-23] imgvtopgm 2.0-9 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch) [2011-02-13] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9 (source i386) (signed by: Erik Schanze)
The changelog of that NMU was:
* Non-maintainer upload.
* debian/rules: Add build-{arch,indep}. (Closes: #999003)
From my naive perspective this package caused some work from a quitebusy maintainer for no obvious user base. May be I'm wrong in this specific case but this observation raises my question: Do we have any means to get rid of packages that should be rather removed from the distribution than draining resources.
You are getting it wrong what was draining the resources.
It was not the package that was draining the resources,
it was the MBF that was draining the resources.
And these MBFs usually fail to make a convincing case that the benefits
are worth all the resources that are drained by the MBF.
If the answer is no should we possibly use the list of packages that are not topic of the heated debate around the source format 1.0 (where maintainers are obviously are caring about their packages just disagree with format 3.0 format) to pick some packages that should be rather
removed than fixed?
How do you define "rather removed"?
According to the BTS there was and is no known user-visible problem in
the package that needed or needs fixing in the package you are using
as example.
I am still a regular user of my 15 year old iPod, and I was pretty
annoyed when I had to do an emergency adoption (changing nothing but the maintainer field) of a package I use for it after seeing that someone
thought it would be a good idea to do "RM: RoQA; Upstream not active, orphaned".
As DD I can do that if I notice, the average user cannot do anything and won't even notice until the next release in 1.5 years.
I do consider it a regression when we no longer ship a package in a
release that was in the previous Debian release.
It is not a problem for us to continue shipping imgvtopgm.
And that's why I'd like to see a case made why it is better for our
users when a package is no longer shipped.
It might or might not be possible to make the case for removal of this specific package, but "low popcon" or "abandoned upstream" alone are not convincing points.
I'm not sure whether there are any PalmPilot devices out there. At
least the actual *votes* in popcon[1] is down to zero now. The package
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years.
It received an NMU by
Adrian Bunk (in CC as well):
Do we have any
means to get rid of packages that should be rather removed from the distribution than draining resources.
Am 16.03.22 um 14:11 schrieb Andreas Tille:
I'm not sure whether there are any PalmPilot devices out there. At
Yes, there are still such devices out there.
least the actual *votes* in popcon[1] is down to zero now. The package
I would not trust popcorn at all. It is disabled at installation by
default and even I does not use it. There is no *real* data base for
package usage out there IMO.
Even if we would have real usage count, IMO it should not be a rule to
keep a package or remove it.
We already have mechanism to exclude packages with serious issue from releases. For packages that are not part of one or several releases, we
could ask the maintainer to fix or remove, that would be fair.
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years.
Yes, because upstream development was finished and packaging was working
so far. No need for new uploads IMO.
It received an NMU by
Adrian Bunk (in CC as well):
I thanked Adrian for stepping in, but had in on my list, too. (Low prio, because I didn't see the "serious" on this "policy issue")
Do we have any
means to get rid of packages that should be rather removed from the distribution than draining resources.
If the package was not part of one or two releases and maintainer (or
any other dev) have no interest to fix it, I would agree.
If you use the popcorn count to decide this I would strongly disagree.
Am Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 08:37:28PM +0100 schrieb Erik Schanze:
Am 16.03.22 um 14:11 schrieb Andreas Tille:
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years.
Yes, because upstream development was finished and packaging was working
so far. No need for new uploads IMO.
My point was that there are teams inside Debian (like reprocucible
builds or crossbuilding like bug #989953) who file bugs with patches to
a lot of packages. I personally think we should somehow help them to spent their energy on packages that are worth it.
During my last round of mass-rebuilds I unfortunately didn't apply this heuristic and stumbled across src:ants. In contrast to Andreas, I think that even packages without a maintainer upload for >10 years should *not* be kicked
out of the archive even if their popcon numbers are down to zero.
However, I do not understand why we do not have a mechanism to kick out source
packages like src:ants automatically for good. Not because of its low (and decreasing) popcon number but because:
- the last stable release the source package was part of, was stretch
- its binary package was last installable during the development of buster and
uninstallable since then
- the source package has four open RC bugs with the *youngest* from four years
ago
Why do we carry essentially useless weight around for so many years?
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