I was thinking more that, if we are going to remove a buggy package because of the bugs, we should still provide it, since there are some people that are looking for that package. Maybe a section of main called "buggy" if it's still included for completeness?
Dave Bristel On Sat, 18 Sep 1999, Robert Stone wrote: > Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 15:49:37 -0700 > From: Robert Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: David Bristel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org > Subject: Re: Move proftpd to contrib > > On Fri, Sep 17, 1999 at 07:52:24AM -0700, David Bristel wrote: > > Or a new section for packages removed from main due to bugs, but possibly > > still desired by some people? It's safer to have a clear message that > > "Debian considers these packages to contain too many bugs for inclusion in > > the main distribution, but we are aware that there are some who want to > > use these packages anyway." Something like this would eliminate any blame > > if people use those buggy packages, and then have their systems crash or > > go unstable, or get hacked. Any opinions? > > > I would fear it would come across like were pointing fingers at > bad software developers in the community, as though we were putting a > package on probation for being too buggy. I don't think our goal is to > seperate good software from bad software. > It might be within our scope to publish bugs per code lines per > year statistics or other hard number observations to make that decision > easier for others, and possibly avoid dependencies on software that has > too high a ratio of bugs to code lines or some other weighted but > objective comparision. A good bug vector would also give credit to > software more widely deployed (1 in every X persons sees a bug in package > Y every Z months). > Our goal is in a general sense to make free sofware easier to > install, use, and maintain. If that software has problems, it's not > our place to single it out. At most it might be worthwhile to help > identify where more developer effort needs to go, but if we don't have > the resources to devote that effort, it could be harmful to point fingers. > > -Robert >