On Sun, Apr 07, 2024 at 04:04:18PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: > Hi Wouter, > > Am Sun, Apr 07, 2024 at 03:31:43PM +0200 schrieb Wouter Verhelst: > > [Feel free to quote any part of this email which I wrote outside of this > > mailinglist] > > OK, moving the discussion to debian-devel where it should belong. > > > Debian packages need to be well maintained. In some cases, having > > multiple maintainers on a package improves the resulting quality of > > packages. But in some other cases, it does not; one example for this > > second case is my package "logtool", which I'm going to upload to fix > > #1066251 soon and for which by the simple act of doing that I will > > double the amount of uploads it's seen in the past five years (and the > > number of uploads in the past 10 can still be counted on the fingers of > > a single hand). > > > > This is not because it's not well maintained; it's because the package > > just *does not require* a lot of work to be kept up to date: upstream > > has not been active for over 20 years, but it still performs the job it > > was designed to do, as it was designed to, and I see no need to have it > > removed from the archive. > > What is your opinion about pushing logtool to Salsa? Not speaking for logtool obviously, but maintaining simple packages on salsa is just useless bureaucracy. Forcing people to waste time creating a salsa project, a git repository etc. to maintain what is effectively a debian/rules that can be summarised by "dh:" does not serve any purpose. 'git log' is just redundant with debian/changelog. If you want the source of a package, 'apt-get source' should suffice. Most of the actual packager work is not reflected in the source package. Testing that the package integrates well with the rest of Debian, replying to bug reports, communicating with upstream etc. The more we waste time with bureaucracy the less we have time for actual work. For some of my packages I have a tool that generates the debian directory from the upstream metadata, so all packages debian/ are similar looking. Storing the output of this tool in separate git repo for each packages would be a absolute waste of resources. Also on a large timescale, our infrastructure change. We move from one VCS to another, to one service to another etc. and then repository need to be moved. It takes time. I maintain a number of packages. Some are on Salsa, some are not, some are team maintained, some are not, some use dh, some use debhelper etc. This is a matter of efficiency, one size does not fit all. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballombe@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
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