Orphaning Candidate packages for removal due to FTBFS, implications

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:27:04PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 11:55 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 20:44 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> > > 
> > > Imho the only real problem from your list is, if a package is
> > > unmaintained, because if it is maintained, the maintainer usually
> > uses
> > > it, otherwise he would just drop it. If upstream is dead but the
> > > maintainer fixes bugs, when they are found, I do not see a problem,
> > > either. 
> > 
> > Often maintainers don't realize they have some of these packages, or
> > the
> > maintainers have left the project.
> > 
> > Even your most stable packages get touched nearly once a year due to
> > distribution changes.  With a more active rpm upstream I suspect we'll
> > be seeing even more need to rebuild everything, at least once a year.
> > 
> > In fact, if we were only checking once a year, I bet many of these
> > packages are going to get hidden behind the mass rebuilder.
> 
> So...the argument is we should worry about packages that don't get
> touched every six months, but no-one should be bothered about this,
> because everything gets touched at least every six months, even if it's
> not by the maintainer so the touch doesn't prove anything one way or
> another about the activeness or otherwise of the maintainer?
> 
> I'm a bit lost. :)

After some talk on IRC yesterday, skvidal is the person doing work on this
at them moment.  His plan is to implement tests that try to tell if
individual packages are maintained and get people to orphan those that are
not.  Here's his general plan for what to test:

"""
 1. all the pkgs which have no devel checkins in > 365 days
    1a, if the only checkins they have correspond to a massrebuild date
        - then they still get counted as potentially abandoned
 2. all the pkgs which have no builds, other than mass rebuilds in > 365
    days then take that set of pkgs and if it is a LARGE number of pkgs
    - then intersect that with pkgs which have bugs open to reduce the set
    a bit b/c open bugs AND not looked at == problems for fedora
"""

We discussed whether to do reporting from this via bugzilla or another tool
and I'm leaning towards another tool so it's easy for a maintainer to look
through and a list of packages and check which ones they still care about.
skvidal would like to get the tests working first to see if we're talking
about a huge number of packages or only a few.

-Toshio
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