Re: Debian Archive architecture removals

[peter green <plugwash@p10link.net>]

> >  Perhaps we need a political decision here?
>
> I think it's mostly a practical one, as I don't see much disagreement
> about the objectives here: What is the best way to arrange things to
> support 'released, supported, all-equal' ports vs 'best-effort, let
> them get out of sync' 2nd-class ports (both on the way up ('upcoming')
> and on the way down ('legacy')).
It seems to me that "second class ports" can be divided into three rough 
categories, 'new ports that are up and coming' (arm64 and ppc64el were 
in this category until recently, x32 could arguablly be included too), 
'legacy ports where maintinance has slipped to the point they got kicked 
out of the set of first class ports' (alpha, m68k, etc) and 'ports that 
despite being around for years never made it to the set of first class 
ports' (hurd-i386, ppc64, sparc64, sh4, powerpcspe, argubally x32)

Now on to the political side.

What should the expectations of maintainers of second class ports be? 
Should they expect reasonable patches to be merged? who gets to define 
"reasonable"? what if anything should their recourse be if/when 
maintainers either ignore or activately stonewall them? is it ok for 
maintainers of second class ports to NMU when they are ignored by 
package maintainers? if package mtainers stonewall maintainers of second 
class ports should they reffer the matter to the technical committe? 
Should porter expectations be different between "upcoming", "legacy", 
and "never made it" ports? should reports be clearly labelled so that 
maintainers can quickly tell if the reported problem relates to a "first 
class" or a "second class" port? should "second class" ports be labelled 
as "unofficial"?