Second follow-up to "52 packages it would be nice to remove"

From: Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Sun Jul 16 2006 - 20:39:43 CEST

Hi all,

Back in May I posted a list of 52 packages that had RC bugs older than a
month and very few users listed in popcon:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2006/05/msg00026.html

In June I gave an update:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2006/06/msg00063.html

and I sent out emails to most of the package maintainers asking whether
it would be OK to remove the packages in question from the Debian archive.

Here are the results since then. The executive summary, one month after
the update, is that

* 15 out of 52 source packages have been fixed (many by NMU) or had all
  RC bugs downgraded
* 8 source packages have gotten an OK from the maintainer to be removed
* 29 source packages remain unfixed. Of those:
  - in 10 cases the RC bugs have not yet been fixed but the maintainer
    expressed a wish to keep the package
  - in 2 cases the maintainer was non-committal about whether the
    package should be removed from the archive
  - in 17 cases I received no response from the maintainer even though
    I allowed more than a month. Some of these would make good NMU
    targets since the RC bugs have a patch attached.

The "every package is sacred" brigade will be happy to hear that in
every case where I requested a package to be removed, I had the explicit
consent of the maintainer. But IMO the last 17 cases described above
are good candidates for hijacking, forcible orphaning, and/or removal.

For details, read on.

The 15 with all RC bugs fixed or downgraded:

camas
gerstensaft
hoichess
libcwd
libooc-xml
manderlbot
mozilla-locale-lt
mozilla-thunderbird-locale-nb
nbsmtp
openoffice.org2-soikko
php4-kadm5
poldi
postgis
python-smbpasswd
spfmilter

The 8 cases in which the maintainers said it was fine to remove the
source package or had already filed a removal request against
ftp.debian.org:

barrendero (removal bug filed as #378485)
hat (maintainer said he would file the removal bug himself)
kernel-patch-adamantix (bug filed as #364684, already removed)
libsem (bug filed as #373088, removed)
mozilla-firefox-locale-tr (bug filed as #359202, removed)
pike-crypto-build (bug filed as #373114, removed)
rsbac-admin (bug filed as #364685, removed)
xsim (bug filed as #364619, removed)

The other 29 source packages are still in the archive with unfixed RC
bugs. These can be broken down into three cases:

* Maintainer explicitly expressed a wish to keep maintaining the package:

dbmail
gforge
ghc-cvs
harbour
interchange
interchange-doc
kernel-patch-time (this has one RC bug tagged "patch")
libvpopmail-perl
php4-vpopmail
rivet

* Maintainer was non-committal about whether the package should be removed:

bayonne
zmailer

* Maintainer did not reply to me (even though I allowed over a month for
a response). In this case I've listed the packages by maintainer in
hopes of public shaming having some effect. I also noted "patch" when
all of the RC bugs have patches that might make them easy targets for NMUs.

Marcus Crafter <crafterm@debian.org>
   forrest

Yann Dirson <dirson@debian.org>
   parted-swig

Jean-Francois Dive <jef@debian.org>
   isakmpd

Anthony Fok <foka@debian.org>
   chdrv
   mozilla-locale-zh-cn
   mozilla-locale-zh-tw

Adam Heath <doogie@brainfood.com>
   kernel-patch-nfs-swap

Yven Johannes Leist <leist@beldesign.de>
   xnap (patch)
   xnap-snapshot (patch)

Stephen M Moraco <stephen@debian.org>
   divine

David Martínez Moreno <ender@debian.org>
   openmash

David Pye <dmp@davidmpye.dyndns.org>
   xbox-cromwell (patch)

Gaetan RYCKEBOER <gryckeboer@virtual-net.fr>
   spip

Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>
   asterisk-chan-misdn

Masato Taruishi <taru@valinux.co.jp>
   ultrapossum-slapd

Debian VoIP Team <pkg-voip-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   yate

Florian M. Weps <fmw@debian.org>
   libooc-vo

best regards,

-- 
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu>   Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/    Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751                 Princeton, NJ 08544

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Received on Mon Jul 17 18:34:41 2006

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