On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 06:50:50PM -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 15:30 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 19:12 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Keeping packages around with no maintainers or people handling their bugs is poor for everyone.
Why? If I, as a user, really need a certain piece of software, I'd rather have an unmaintained package than none at all! Worst case, I can't use the package at all, in which case I'm still no worse off than with no package at all!
I disagree. The existence of a package triggers certain assumptions: the package will be maintained and keep working. That's the point of there *being* a package, after all. So if there's a package for something, I don't check for security updates for that 'something' myself. I figure the packager is doing that for me.
So if I wind up with an unmaintained package installed, my security has just been reduced.
Yes, I agree with this completely. If something is not being maintained in Fedora, it's better to retire it. Then a user who wants that piece of software will have two options:
- They can build it and maintain it themselves on their own system(s)
- They can choose to build and maintain it for Fedora by unretiring it.
3) They can choose another distro that contains the package(s).
D.