[arch-dev-public] Repo cleanup / Package adoption

[Eric Belanger]

>
> But I doubt I can pull in much more.
>
> Off topic:
> sqlite2 is on that list along due to python-sqlite-legacy... do you
> guys think we still need sqlite2? I don't think anything still needs
> it for backwards compat.

The only packages that depends on sqlite2 and python-pysqlite-legacy are 
in community so I guess we could remove both from extra.

>
>
>>  I haven't updated the wiki list since the last time except a when I happen
>> to stumble on a new orphan so it might be slightly out-of-date compared to
>> the dashboard orphans.  When it'll be significantly smaller, I'll update it.
>
> I just removed the ones I listed above.
>
> Thanks for all the hardwork Eric. Considering you've put the most time
> into this - do you think we need more package maintainers to handle
> the load? Or do you think we could more properly distribute what we
> have among ourselves?
>

I'll need more feedback before knowing if the load is too much. You're the 
only dev that had stuff to adopt who had replied so far. Dan, who adopted 
a core orphan, and Travis didn't had any depends to adopt. We'll have to 
see what the others will say.

As for adding new devs to handle the load, it will decrease the workload 
only if we do it right. If we just bring in a TU, say, and he only move 
his community packages to extra, that won't decrease the load at all. 
Ideally, we need to bring someone willing to pick up a significant portion 
of these orphans. The main difficulty here is that, except for a few 
standalone packages that we can always move to unsupported, most remaining 
orphans are libraries which are not particularly interesting to maintain. 
Perhaps the better way to do this would be for everyone to go through his 
packages and to come up with a list of packages for which they would be 
willing to hand over the maintainership to the new dev.  The new dev would 
pick up the package he wants.  This will decrease the workload of some 
devs who might be able to adopt more orphaned depends.

It also came up to me that it would be a bad idea to have every dev with a 
100% packages workload. If sometime they have less time to devote to Arch, 
the package maintenance will suffer. Also, if a dev becomes inactive for a 
period of time, no one else will have the time to take care of his 
packages. Plus, we'll spend less of our time to do developement work.

Probably more devs wouldn't hurt.  But if we want the addition of devs to 
reflect in the workload, we must somehow organize ourselves such that the 
new dev ends up maintaining packages that are already in the repo 
(core/extra).

Eric

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