Orphaning Candidate packages for removal due to FTBFS, implications

[Till Maas]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 10:13:32AM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:13:29 +0100, Ralf wrote:
> 
> > On 01/15/2010 08:17 PM, Matt Domsch wrote:
> > >
> > > At today's FESCo meeting, it was agreed that all the below packages
> > > would be marked orphan.
> >
> > Well, if FESCO thinks this was a good idea ... I think you guys stopped 
> > half-ways: You better should have launched AWOL-processes against these 
> > maintainers.
> 
> It's a more fundamental problem, though. The AWOL-process is for people,
> not for packages. The people may still be active (and even known to be
> active somewhere) and not AWOL, but the packages which are assigned to
> them would still look orphaned. FTBFS is just one way to find packages
> that don't even build.

If the maintainers are still active and still do not ask for help for
the packages they cannot handle, then this is imho a behaviour that
should not be supported. If we orphan all packages for maintainers with
long standing FTBFS bugs that are not worked on and the maintainer still
care about some of their packages, they can just unorphan these
particular packages.

> However, if that happens, it may be much too late. Such a package may have
> been in an unmaintained desolate state for a long time already. With
> nobody handling the incoming bugzilla tickets. With some bug reports having
> been killed in an automated way at dist EOL. And worse if it turns out
> that packages which do build are unmaintained nevertheless, with the same
> symptoms in bugzilla and in package scm.

I agree.

> Makes me wonder what bugzilla status report scripts we have? To create a
> list of potentially unmaintained packages earlier and to detect packages
> with non-responsive owners.

There are the probably not working anymore scripts that were used ages
ago for the weekly(?) Fedora package status reports:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/status-report-scripts/?root=fedora

Regards
Till
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