Consider this a request for interest and comments. I've heard enough about this over the past few months to finally break down and formally propose it. This proposal breaks down into several issues, one is a proposal for policy to outline procedures for removing obsolete and unmaintained packages from the archive without regard to the bug count or other usual deciding factors. The second is a call for resolutions to establish an audit facility for the archive to determine which programs are unmaintained and obsolete, as well as purging these from the archive.
First of all I know that our ftp maintainers are already overworked. I know that most people hate removing software without good cause. I want to say that this is all pre-emptive, before our problems get so bad we can't fix them easily. As for archive maintainers, well, we need more, or atleast a better means of automating our contact with them. As for removing software from the archive, a lot of what needs to be removed is a combination of dangling source and packages (packages that no longer are created by the source and should be removed or source that is obsoleted by one of a different name, and so doesn't really create the packages anymore). To resolve one of the issues, I propose the DPL appoint an audit group. This group will go through the archive (either manually or using internally created scripts) and generate detailed lists of dangling source/packages and post them for removal via the BTS and/or direct email to the archive maintainers. They will also generate lists of obsolete and unmaintained packages that are in the archive (the age of innactivity of maintainership to be determined by a set time length and attempts at contacting the last known maintainer for a defined amount of time). Some of these packages could be put into a new directory called old-obsolete/, this may be in binary form or source only (not sure which would be better), others may simply be removed completely from the archive. These lists should be publically available to provide notice as well as to update WNPP (not all abandoned packages are known). Let's please consider this rationally, don't get pissy just because I would like to see Debian's archive better maintained with less dated cruft and more relevant, maintained packages. Ben Collins
