package (tinyca2) not longer present in F15, what to do about it?

[J.Witvliet at mindef.nl]

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of Chris Adams
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 3:53 PM
To: users at lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Re: package (tinyca2) not longer present in F15, what to do about it?

Once upon a time, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> said:
> I should note, however, that tinyca2 development appears dead upstream.
> It last saw a release on July 25, 2006! So chances are good that it's no
> longer safe for inclusion in Fedora.

Why does "long time since last release" mean "no longer safe"?  Programs
don't have to change for the sake of change.
-----Original Message-----

Imho, I think different things are mixed up....

A) a very well designed piece of software I less likely to suffer from daily/weekly/monthly updates
And security patches or bug fixes might introduce new "side effects" themselves ;-)

B) Any program with a GUI have to move along, if your program uses an ancient version of qt/gtk1/php3/python/perl/you-name-it, their might come a time that those libs are not shipped anymore.

C) No maintainer means that no one simply looks _IF_ their might be issues. If it is still in (any) distro, it probably means that there were no errors during building/linking.


Specially with any package that is somehow related to security it would be comforting to be assured that at least some people take the trouble to have a look at it. The fact that without any changes it still works after all these years would not be enough for something like a CA.

So what to do about it? Move to something else or get it properly maintained.

hw

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