Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> It is not useful to generalize. There are lots of software components
> which aren't actively maintained but are useful to have in the
> distribution and all distributions have them however a desktop
> environment is a lot of work to maintain (as seen for instance in
> http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1901) and if upstream is not active, then
> any potential needs to be aware of this before volunteering this
> feature. If someone really wants to still do it, there is nothing in
> Fedora stopping it from happening. I was merely raising a potential
> issue to think about in advance.
Software with dead or almost dead upstream is a two-edged sword:
* If the software is working well, that's the software which is easiest to
maintain, since there are generally few to no new upstream releases to
take care of. :-) (But if it's something like Trinity, which manages to
churn out release after release with a single maintainer, including
binary-incompatible library changes, that's also not the case. But I'd
place that in the below paragraph anyway. ;-) There are literally
THOUSANDS of KDE 3 bugs closed as fixed in KDE SC 4.)
* If the software has many bugs, it's the software which is hardest to
maintain, because then YOU as the Fedora maintainer are on the hook for
fixing those bugs.
Unfortunately, a desktop environment tends to be in the latter situation.
So I'm sceptical about MATE (seeing what's going on with Trinity) and I can
only strongly discourage attempting to package Trinity.
Kevin Kofler
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