Bug#859808: composite: Composite not ready for being qualified package of Debian yet.

James Cowgill jcowgill at debian.org
Sat Apr 8 14:27:52 UTC 2017


On 08/04/17 14:01, diqidoq | MAROQQO wrote:
> Thanks for your thoughts on this, James, but let me reply on this clearly:
> 
> On 04/08/2017 01:35 PM, James Cowgill wrote:
>> If the functionality provided by composite is now in hydrogen or
>> elsewhere then maybe composite can be removed on the basis that it's
>> obsolete and has little upstream activity, but since I don't use these
>> packages I don't really have an opinion on this.
> 
> I think you misunderstood sth here. It is rather upside down. Not the
> functionality provided by composite is now in hydrogen, IT IS Hydrogen
> and ever was, and Composite came later to just made a fork/clone of the
> code of Hydrogen by promising to make something else out of it what
> never happend.

I don't think I misunderstood, I just don't know much about hydrogen or
composite. Obviously the GUIs look almost identical, and I think it
would be better to drop composite if users can be switched to hydrogen
with no loss in functionality.

> On 04/08/2017 01:35 PM, James Cowgill wrote:
>> While you have some good points, I don't think any of them are
>> sufficient reason to force the removal
> 
> Another point where I thought it should be upside down. Shouldn't there
> be rather reasons to add a package, not reasons to remove one which is
> maybe a duplicate? What were the reasons of this package to be added?

We're not talking about adding a package. We're talking about either
keeping or removing a package. I think (and hopefully you agree) that we
shouldn't be randomly removing packages without good reasons (some of
which we are currently discussing).

> On 04/08/2017 01:35 PM, James Cowgill wrote:
>> Beyond that there are no other hard rules other than the package
>> should have a maintainer willing to support it.
> 
> Wow. o.O ... This is a really hard statement. Are you aware of this?
> Does Debian security team agree with that?

I don't think there is anything wrong with what I said. Did you actually
read the link I posted?

It says:
> In addition, the packages in main
[...]
> must not be so buggy that we refuse to support them

That should cover the security team's concerns. In reality the release
team has the final say on all this, but they use policy as a guide.

> On 04/08/2017 01:35 PM, James Cowgill wrote:
>> There are a lot of old packages in Debian which are
>> not going away any time soon.
> 
> This makes absolutely sense to me, but not with duplicated or mistakenly
> added packages without warnings. Debian has removed ffmpeg and replaced
> it by libav in the days when libav was forking and later has corrected
> this issue very quick in the next release cycle and brought back ffmpeg.
> So I think it is not about "every thing keeps being in when it is in" ...

I think FFmpeg and libav was a special case where there was lots of
pressure to only have one of them shipping as part of a release. It's
not the same here.

James

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