Bonfire of the Packages

[Thomas Wolff]

Am 24.09.2023 um 20:20 schrieb gstrauss via Cygwin-apps:
> On Sun, Sep 24, 2023 at 01:32:59PM +0100, Jon Turney via Cygwin-apps wrote:
>> Generally, we have a large number of old, unmaintained packages.
>>
>> The policy [1] has always been "Packages without an active maintainer may be
>> pulled from the distribution.", but not actively enforced (in fact prior to
>> 2022, this used to say "are pulled", but I moderated the statement, just to
>> reflect reality).
>>
>> I guess what's needed is an automated process which removes unmaintained
>> packages, after some period of time in that state.
>>
>> I'm somewhat ambivalent about doing that, as they are probably of some use,
>> but on the hand I don't think our users are best served providing very old
>> packages with unknown numbers of bugs, security problems, etc., or which are
>> unsupported upstream.
> Were the first steps to be performed by an automated process, I would
> propose that the automated process mark and move packages
> 'pending delete' to a new category "abandoned", which is not installed
> by default, but selectable in the cygwin setup.exe.  Alternatively,
> 'promote' the abandoned packages to "testing".  After a period of time
> in "abandoned" or "testing", the packages could be removed to a holding
> area, but not yet deleted, since this is the time that some people might
> start to notice.  It would be nice to be able to restore packages
> relatively quickly during this period.  Finally, after another period of
> time passes, delete the package.
>
> Cheers, Glenn
I have two packages that were not updated for 7 years for a while, for 
different reasons, but are still maintained.
What criteria would you have in mind? I don't think this is a reasonable 
approach.
Thomas