On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, Thomas Bächler wrote:
I had this thought during the above discussion about compat-wireless: Do we really need unstable? Almost nobody uses it and let's see which packages are in there:
opera-devel firefox3 kernel26mm fvwm-devel gimp-devel reiser4progs + dependencies. openoffice-devel mplayer-svn
Most of the rest is so out of date and old that it should be dropped anyway (including the external modules for kernel26mm). The packages that are actually being maintained can IMO be moved to extra. Everybody who installs a -svn or -devel package probably knows it is unstable (firefox3 should be renamed to firefox-devel then).
So I'm asking you: What is the point of having a repository with <30 packages, half of which are neither used nor maintained? Except maybe confusion among users (wait? enable unstable? isn't that dangerous?).
You forgot gqview-devel in your list. The package is up-to-date and it works fine. I've been using it for years as my main image viewer without any problems. I don't see why we wouldn't keep it. I agree about removing the out-of-date and old packages unless a dev wants to actively maintain them. I don't mind wether we keep the rest in the unstable repo or move them in extra. If we move them in extra, we could add "Developement version" at the end of the package description to inform the user. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.