[Soc-coordination] GSOC idea for next year: undusting some packages

[Otavio Salvador]

Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> writes:

>   I don't know if GSoC would help, but I agree with what Christian said.
> The state of apt right now is a scandal.  This is a core part of the
> package management system for our project as well as several commercial
> distributions, and yet it's been neglected on and off ever since I
> started working with it nine years ago.  Sometimes someone picks it up
> for a while and fixes a few of the problems, but it's been a long time
> since it had a really active primary maintainer.  (I hope no-one is
> offended if I say that: Michael and Otavio have been doing fine
> work [0], but mostly acting as caretakers, not project leaders.  I
> think they would agree with me.)

I fully agree that APT needs more love and that I and Michael hasn't
been able to take care of it as it deserves however it is not only
that. As you already noticed people don't worry a lot about it and
just notice it ever exists when find a ugly and serious bug.

All my free time is being used on d-i nowadays and I've been involved
in too many core projects (d-i, parted, apt). All those are critical
for Debian as a whole and I try to spend the required time when needed
but ... as for most of us, this isn't enough.

We need to make easy to people to contribute to APT. APT is boring to
develop for many reasons:

 - it is a big and complex codebase;
 - its SCM is not the hype out there;
 - people thinks apt "just works";
 - is a really core compoment and any bug is a disaster...

On top of that, most changes are left for too late and aren't suitable
for Lenny. Michael has not spending the time on that too and APT end
up in this situation.

I'd like to see more people contributing to it and I do believe it can
be done; but not for Lenny...

-- 
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