Debian developers plan a process for package recovery

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During the last weeks Debian developers team have been considering a new possibility of being able to perform package recovery within the official repositories of the distribution.

The discussion has been carried through the Debian mailing lists(which we can consult) and in them this new initiative has been proposed by the group of developers, to recover abandoned packages.

To understand this initiative a bit, we must know that Debian like most big Linux distributions it is maintained and supported by developers that are all over the world.

In addition to it has a large community of users and people who usually contribute packages to the distribution with which not only its official team is in charge of providing the software for this system.

With this we can understand that a large part of the applications, libraries and other software that we find within Debian is maintained and developed by its community.

Consequently, end users of the system can enjoy a large number of applications on the system.

Understanding a bit this concept of how software is added and supported within Debian repositories. We can understand that at the end of the day it is people who take care of this.

So it is also the case that the people who give support and updates to the software that we can find in Debian, tend to stop giving the support, abandon the development.

In this way many of the packages tend to be unsupported and become "orphaned" packages.

About Debian Package Salvaging

Recognizing that not all packages are kept at the same level and some are ultimately simply abandoned without further ado, Debian developers are discussing a package recovery process in this type of situation.

Like other distributions, Debian has processes for orphaned packages when a maintainer disappears or voluntarily gives up maintaining a particular package.

But eThis proposed package recovery process is for poorly maintained or fully maintenance-free packages that are not in the category of "orphans"

Under the proposed guidelines, A Debian package could be saved if there are open bugs, requests for updates or if there is some demand from users and there hasn't been any work activity on it in six months.

Also if the errors present are greater than one year since they were found.

In this manner It is proposed that the Package Salvaging initiative be in charge of being able to carry out the necessary updates and / or corrections of said packages so that end users continue to enjoy them.

Although at the moment this initiative is still under discussion by Debian developers.

We can find some information on this Debian package recovery proposal within the project wiki, which we can already visit and learn about. from the link below.

Also for those who are interested, it is possible to keep track of the mailing lists that are within from the following link.

Here we can see what the developers propose about this proposal.

Personally, I think this is a good initiative, since different packages that had very good use in the system and were no longer supported may have a second time of use.

And on the other hand it also makes me think that the fact that someone else is in charge of resuming development can greatly influence the main idea of ​​the software that is proposed to recover.

Finally for now We know that the topic is under discussion on the mailing list and entry will be accepted until September when they get to work writing the final version of the Package Salvaging guidelines.


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