Since people complained about lack of documentation concerning Alioth I decided to write down the most important things in the Debian Wiki.
Check http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth. Feel free to complete the page and to spread the infos whereever needed.
How to handle unmaintained packages with few users
Last week I had an interesting discussion with Benjamin Bayart about unmaintained packages which have very few users. Once the initial maintainer disappear, we usually don’t find another one having both Debian skills and a good knowledge of the package. So the software just stay there until it becomes so outdated that it doesn’t work anymore… and then it gets removed blindly. Most of those packages have a low “popcon” rating so they get removed without care.
Read the whole problematic described by Benjamin, and then see my initial mail with a suggestion on how to do better in that area.
The discussion has seen interesting developments even if there’s no consensus (yet). But it’s an important topic concerning QA, so I hope that something useful will come out of it… I’d like to have more time to implement something but I’m already overloaded… I really should have proposed projects for Google’s summer of code. 🙂
Debian booth at LSM
This morning when I arrived to the LSM (Libre Software Meeting) in Dijon (France) I discovered that there was no Debian booth … so I quickly created one. Emmanuel Dreyfus agreed to give me a bit of space on his NetBSD booth. Thanks !
Feel free to come to the little Debian booth. There’s not much to see on the booth but you can bring your stuff if you have…
Pragmatism in Debian
First time I’m doing ping-pong on a blog … but I need to respond to MJ Ray and I can’t leave comments on his bog.
He’s worried that I’m using the word “pragmatism” to defend my ideas. He also defines himself as pragmatist… and that’s right. Most of us choosed free software because that was the best option for us. We’re all pragmatists in that sense.
Part of this common pragmatism is to be able to fix things when they go wrong. Right. However pragmastism doesn’t mean that we should be able to fix things where nothing can go wrong.
What do you want to fix in the Firefox logo ? in its name ?
Of course, that doesn’t apply to firmwares, they may contain bugs and we might be interested to fix them. However removing them serves no purpose : users don’t have working drivers, and free replacements won’t appear just because we decided to remove them.
Pragmatist means that *we compose at best with what currently exists*. You can’t take into account “uncertain future outcomes”. We take what works now and if something better (in terms of freeness and in terms of quality) comes later then we replace it. We can’t anticipate with what’s going to happen.
That’s my vision of pragmatism applied to Debian. That’s why I believe my proposal makes sense. I do not propose to include arbitrary non-free stuff but only things which are __useful__ to existing free software. I’m happy to discuss further how to define more precisely the scope of “useful” in the above sentence.
