Re: [Cooker] purpose of /incoming, unmaintained packages

[Guillaume Rousse]

Götz Waschk wrote:
> 2006/1/9, Moreno <moreno.mg@gmail.com>:
> 
>>>there's no need to upload this package to incoming. I already maintain
>>>it and I can update to a new version by myself. But if you have any
>>>suggestions or patches, you can mail them to me.
>>
>>I do not understand exactly how work ftp.mandriva.com/incoming.
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I think the main purpose is for new packages, that is packages that
> aren't yet in contribs or main to be uploaded and that somebody who is
> already a package maintainer can take it, review and upload it.
Actually, it is a reminiscence of old time, when there was no access to
the build cluster for contributeurs. It remained there unchanged...

>  > I have found a lot of package very old without update (your is one of
> 
>>the most recently updated).
We (contributers) don't have write access to this directory, and are
unable to remove old content, as we only access a mirrored copy.

> I didn't have time to update the package yet. We have automated tools
> that notify us of new versions of our packages, so it is not needed to
> upload new versions to incoming
It is discussable: just having of notification of an available update is
not the same as having a contributed ready-to-roll updated package. The
problem often comes from the lack of quality of those contributed packages.

>>I have updated some of this package for give my contribute to the community.
>>How i can know if a package is abandoned ??
> 
> 
> This is hard to answer. Maybe if a package is several versions behind
> the latest upstream one. But sometimes there are reasons not to go to
> the newest version.
This is actually impossible to answer, as package life cycle in mandriva
has never been considered a serious issue, worth to get discussed. So
far, everyone seems to be happy with the principle of adding new stuff
continuously, occasionaly removing package on case by case.

As a result, we still have in the distribution todays:
- package wich can't get rebuild today for various reasons, such as
gnome-multi-terminal
- packages wich have never been able to work, such as cfengine1
- packages wich haver not been rebuild for more than 3 years, such as
tkbable

This is unlikely to change until we have some reflexion about what means
maintaining a package, what are maintained packages today, and the
usefulness of keeping unmaintained ones forever.

>>How i can adopt this poor packages ??
> 
> You could become a package maintainer yourself. Must be documented
> somewhere on the wiki.
More precisely:
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/ContributerHowto

-- 
Bugs will appear in one part of a working program when another
'unrelated' part is modified.
	-- Murphy's Laws of Computer Programming n°2