Dne 18. 09. 20 v 10:24 Petr Pisar napsal(a):
On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 09:09:51PM +0200, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> Dne 17. 09. 20 v 18:29 Kevin Fenzi napsal(a):
>> Well, many maintainers don't touch packages that keep working and don't
>> need updates or bugfixes.
> That is perfectly fine and I expect that in such cases, the maintainer
> would step up and responded to BZ, explained situation and intentions,
> everything would be documented and we could move on. But maintainers
> also does not touch packages, because the keep building and that is
> different situation.
>
I think that nagging maintainers with "Do you want to keep your package in
Fedora" question is too burdensome for the maintainers and a disservice for
the users.
This is not about nagging maintainer for the purpose of nagging them.
>> So, if we know the package doesn't work, we
>> should file a bug on it. If not, I am not sure if we should try and
>> remove such packages.
> Just out of curiosity, I filed this bug:
>
>
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1880144
>
> I used to see a lot of similar packages in Ruby land. Nowadays, they are
> finally gone, because somebody used the non-responsive maintainer policy
> in the end. But I don't want to use non-responsive maintainer policy,
> because I think some package does not serve it purpose anymore.
>
How exactly does a presence of that package offend you?
Maybe because I am maintainer of ruby and rubygem-sinatra and I do care
if packages which depends on them keep working? And just FTR, I came to
rubygem-sinatra-rabbit checking that rubygem-haml is broken. Please note
that I am not maintainer of that package, but I do care about Ruby in
Fedora in general.
That relengs have to
rebuild it twice a year? That you have to download the few kilobytes in
repodata? That when you change Ruby packaging standards, you have to patch the
spec file?
I think that a package should be removed for a real issue that it causes. Not
because of its age.
I agree, and "old" was not the best term. "zombie" is much better
probably. I used that term right in the first paragraph of the original
email. It already got lost here. I update the subject to be more clear.
> Actually, maintaining 200 packages myself, it might happen that some of
> them are in zombie state. I would not mind if they were called out via
> this process.
>
Then start with yourself. Go and file bugs for your 200 packages. Then review
whether they are used by Fedora users. Be ware that Fedora packager is not
a Fedora user. And then close the bugs or retire the packages. And then come
and tell us how much fruitful it was and how much productive you were.
If you feel exhausted by maintaingin the 200 packages, then orphan them.
Fedora already has a process for dealing with unmaintained packages.
A spoiler: Eventually they will be removed from the distribution.
You get it wrong. I feel exhausted seeing again and again packages which
are very likely broken, serving no purpose. I feel exhausted seeing that
these packages pull in dependency chains which are not possible to be
updated or removed due to them.
Vít