We have a stale package report: http://buildfarm.opencsw.org/obsolete-pkgs/stale-packages.html
It is updated once every 24h. You can see that there is a number of packages which have not been updated for 4 years or more. Sometimes the upstream development stops, so there's nothing new to release, but this only applies to a small fraction of software projects. Many upstream projects are active, but corresponding packages are not updated. Dropping old packages has been debated in the past, and the main points were: - Keeping old/stale packages can be good, because they can be useful to someone. - Keeping old/stale packages can be bad, because they are often unused, untested, somebody tries to use them, they don't work, and people think that if one package is broken, most of packages are. - Deleting old/stale packages can be bad, because we take away packages that could be potentially useful to someone. - Deleting old/stale packages can be good, because when a package is not there, potential new maintainers are motivated to rebuild/update them. As a backup, allpkgs still contains all of the old packages in case somebody has their back against the wall. In previous years we've put more weight on the upsides of keeping old packages, but I'd like to emphasize the negatives, and suggest that hoarding really hurts us. We would be better off deleting as many old, unmaintained packages as possible. It would help us if we had an equivalent of Debian popcon, but this has been attempted and wasn't deployed. I don't think we have resources to do that. Maybe instead, we can do something simple, like getting the list of packages that can be deleted (already exists in the stale packages report), and creating an internet poll, where people could mark packages they use / care about. (Note: only packages with no reverse dependencies would be listed.) We would circulate the poll around users@ and announce@, and after two weeks or so of collecting the data, we would drop packages that nobody cares about. All of this is easy to do. Thoughts? Maciej
