Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-10-07)

[Kevin Kofler]

Haïkel wrote:
> This was discussed, I remember that this very point being raised by rishi.
> We agreed (but not voted) that packages with dead upstream should
> unbundle.

But it is only policy if it is written down in the letter of the policy.

> => I don't think anyone is against strict unbundling for dead upstream
> package. Problem is how we detect that a package has a dead upstream :/

I don't follow the logic here: If it is possible to unbundle the library 
even with no upstream that could help at all, then surely it is just as 
possible to unbundle it when upstream is uncooperative! I don't see why an 
uncooperative upstream should be treated any differently from a dead 
upstream, for our purposes they are essentially the same.

> I personally even consider that such packages should just be dropped
> in the long-term.

I am strongly opposed to that!

Removing packages that work and are usually the ones requiring the least 
maintenance work (because there are no new releases to rebase to) is a major 
disservice to our users. Especially if there is no viable maintained 
alternative. (For example, I still use Quanta Plus from KDE 3 kdewebdev 
because there is just nothing comparable anywhere else in Fedora.) And some 
"dead" projects also get revived after some time, see e.g. Merkaartor that 
(after a few months of being "dead") got picked up upstream and ported from 
Qt 4 to Qt 5.

Only if the software stops working and we cannot fix it for whatever reason 
(e.g. because it depends on some web service that is no longer available), 
that is the time to retire it.

        Kevin Kofler