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:
1) They can build it and maintain it themselves on their own system(s)
2) 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.