On Mon, Apr 09, 2018 at 04:12:47PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > (I don't speak for the GNOME team, or for Josselin, who is officially > this package's maintainer; please don't assume I do.) > > On Sun, 08 Apr 2018 at 22:19:43 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > I hereby declare my intent to adopt gconf. > > Thank you for offering to take over this package. Do you also intend > to adopt these related packages? > > - src:gconf-editor (which depends on gconf and is useless without it; > currently maintained by the GNOME team)
Makes sense. > - src:orbit2 (orphaned library needed by gconf) > - src:libidl (orphaned library needed by orbit2) Where does gconf depend on these? > - various language bindings for gconf Good point, I haven't yet looked at these. >... > Do you use software that relies on gconf yourself/are you able to test it? Yes. >... > For contributors: every time a package that hasn't had upstream > development for a few years fails to build during a transition, or > needs fixes for a new architecture, or has RC bugs that someone looks > at during a BSP, it takes a little bit more of several contributors' > time and attention There have been 2 port bringups already this year so far (ia64, riscv64), and a bigger amount of contributors' time and attention is actually wasted for these in cases like #876592 or #887868 where the maintainer didn't apply a simple FTBFS fix for months. > (even if the only attention it gets is to look at the > package, realise it hasn't changed significantly in a decade, and decide > to prioritize something different). Software that depends on gconf isn't > *directly* an indication of something terribly bad, but it's reasonably > well correlated with the dependent software also being unmaintained or > undermaintained upstream. Each individual package blocking a transition, > and each individual RC bug, doesn't necessarily take much time and > attention, but it adds up over time, and I'm concerned that the long > tail of GNOME-2-based packages might be collectively and cumulatively > taking more time and attention than it deserves. >... The worst-possible outcome is when you force reverse dependencies to bundle copies of the libraries, like glademm in aeskulap. >... > If we had bikesheds, PPAs or an equivalent of Ubuntu universe, I'd > suggest moving unmaintained/undermaintained packages to one of those > to indicate that users shouldn't have the same quality expectations, > but we don't currently have that facility. I will begin to take your suggestion seriously after you have managed to enforce that for ITPs - whatever quality expectations we have should be enforced there already, usually software does not suddenly become low-quality after it was shipped in half a dozen Debian releases. > If, bearing all that in mind, you still think Debian is better with > gconf than without it, then I'm not going to try to prevent you from > maintaining it. (Again, I don't speak for the GNOME team.) Thanks. > smcv >... cu Adrian -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed