Quoting Simon McVittie (2025-08-21 16:29:26) > On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 at 12:23:39 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > >I find that the Uploaders field becomes more important, not less, for > >team-maintained packages compared to solo-maintained packages. An > >example is how to recognize if a package is obsolete and best dropped > >from Debian > > I am amused by the contrast between this and what happens in teams like > GNOME, where we have dead packages whose uploaders specifically don't > want them in the distribution, which we have been trying to remove for > in some cases several years, but because the package still has rdeps it > cannot be removed - and as long as it cannot be removed, the GNOME team > feel that we have to be the ones keeping it on life-support, so that we > can at least make use of knowledge from other related packages.
Yes, where I focused on packages noone cared about, in a sense you raise the point of packages where not only maintainers care about them - e.g. "brand maintainers" feeling stained by subpar maintenance of "outside-of-team" packages, and maintainers of reverse dependencies feeling trapped to keep alive (in their view) obsolete code. > Another reason why we keep the team as the maintainer for these > packages, rather than orphaning them, is to make sure that we can be the > ones asking for their removal when it becomes possible - and to try to > avoid situations like #888670 where a formerly-core, formerly-GNOME > package is long-dead upstream, should probably be removed, and certainly > shouldn't be advertised to GNOME users as something that is > well-integrated or recommended, but because someone outside the team > claims to have adopted it, the GNOME team no longer has control over its > status or the authority to remove it. > > I'm sure the Qt/KDE team has plenty of packages from the pre-Qt-6 era > that they feel similarly about (although for whatever reason they seem > to have been more successful at getting old versions of Qt actually > removed), and similar for other large teams. > > It would be nice if we had a representation for "this package is > unmaintained and we recommend removing it if possible, but if an upload is > urgently needed, the GNOME team is the maintainer of last resort". We > could put that on GTK 2, caribou, clutter-1.0, cogl, gtksourceview3, > glade and all their relatives (see also > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=pkg-gnome-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&tag=oldlibs > > ). > > Perhaps Maintainer: debian-qa, Uploaders: pkg-gnome-maintainers would be > a good representation for that situation? Yes, I think so. Ideally I think also Maintainer: python team for all python libraries, with Uploaders: being those caring in particular for their use (multimedia, networking, Sensors, etc.). And similar for Perl, Rust, Haskell, etc. > >I like the > >rule that is (or was, when I was part of it) upheld in the multimedia > >team, that any team-maintained package need at least two uploaders - if > >you care in particular for a package, then add yourself as uploader, and > >when you stop caring then remove yourself - then it becomes easy to > >notice when a package has lost interest within the team > > I don't think there is really anyone who feels personally responsible > for, for example, gnome-calculator, kmahjongg or libnotify - but they're > part of the desktop environment, so if we as a distribution want to be > shipping a complete GNOME environment and a complete KDE environment, > *someone* has to upload them. I think it's unrealistic to expect that > every package will have an enthusiastic maintainer (let alone two), many > packages are only here because they're required by something more > interesting. I am not a GNOME user myself, and would not even notice if gnome-calculator were to disappear. I guess someone in the GNOME would react differently to such an event. What would you call such a.. devotion? Lacking a better description, I call it "feeling responsible". It sounds like you would want a sliding scale, so that you could say "washing the dishes is *NOT* my responsibility, but if everyone else just goes watch TV then put be in very tiny letters at the bottom of the task list as the one grumpily staying behind and doing the dirty work that ideally someone else should've done." Suggestion: Put yourself at the *bottom* of the list of Uploaders. It won't technically make a difference, but might socially - as in, someone tired of wasking the dishes might intuitively hand the dish cloth to the *next* on the list, and someone contacting maintainers might first reach out to the topmost (i.e. more enthusiastic) ones. A Debian-team maintained package with only one Uploader: Solo-maintained -> add it as a code smell. A Debian-team maintained package without any Uploader: Unmaintained -> hand it over the the QA team. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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