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