Re: Obsolete packages

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 7/25/08, Kenneth Nielsen <k nielsen81 gmail com> wrote:
> 2008/5/23 Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>:
> > Le jeudi 22 mai 2008 à 11:48 +0100, Djihed Afifi a écrit :
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > >
> > > Currently in damned-lies there are many obsolete packages that should
> > > probably be deleted or moved into an "obsolete" release set. They may
> > > unnecessarily lure translators into wasting time translating packages
> > > that will never be released.
> > >
> > > Examples include:
> > > * glade  (not glade-3).
> > > * gaelon  (no longer Gnome's browser, not aware of any working on it).
> > > * gtetrinet (orphaned?)
> > > * pan/pan2: any plans for these?
> > >
> > >
> > > Any thoughts?
> >
> > I understand your concern, but it's always difficult to state when a
> > module is really obsolete.
> > glade still got a release last December, galeon published 2.0.5 in
> > February, ...
> >
> > I suspect teams who already translated most of the Desktop should know
> > GNOME enough to estimate if it's worth to translate other releases
> > modules.
> > Currently we follow SVN policy, and when a module is moved to SVN
> > Archive (http://svn-archive.gnome.org) it is removed from
> > l10n.gnome.org.
> >
>  Hey everybody.
> This is sort of a late response to this discussion but I have been busy so
> it couldn't be before now. I share the concern of Djihed and I don't think
> that it is a good solution to rely on people probably knowing what not to
> touch. I think an "obsolete" or "nearly obsolete" release set would be a
> good solution for those modules whose progressive development (these may
> still release but only for bug fixing) has stopped because they have been
> replaced.
>  Regards Kenneth Nielsen

Would you be willing to maintain such a list?
I ask because maintaining such a list would probably be a lot of work,
and a lot of risk in stepping on some one's toes, by accidentally but
incorrectly listing some software as obsolete when in reality it is
not.

The free software world is a divergent and inhomogeneous world -- some
software maintainers do releases every other week, while some only do
maintenance releases once a year or so. The latter does not mean that
those pieces of software are obsolete, only that they are (probably)
mature and currently in a low maintenance mode, which most often means
that bug fixes and translation updates are few and infrequent, but
still happen.

As Claude already said, we already have an official way of declaring a
module "dead": By moving it to the SVN Archive
(http://svn-archive.gnome.org/). If you suspect some module is really
dead (no maintainer or no new releases planned), please do some
research (and contact maintainers to get it confirmed), and then let
svnmaster gnome org know.

If it's not dead, it is not obsolete.


Christian