Monday 10 October 2016

Re: Keep or remove software-center?

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 10:59:52AM -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 9:53 AM, Bryan Quigley
> <bryan.quigley@canonical.com> wrote:
> > I'd say we should remove it, especially because we really don't want
> > anyone stumbling on to using it at this point.

> Some people (not me) do use software-center intentionally and I feel
> it's a freeze break to remove functionality people "depend on", 3 days
> before final release. Therefore, I propose that the freeze exception
> process be followed if someone thinks it's important that this happen
> for Ubuntu 16.10.

While I don't think there's any urgency in removing this package for 16.10,
I'm also going to push back on the idea of requiring a FFe for package
removals. We do a lot of cleanup of obsolete packages (which this one is -
orphaned upstream) in the last weeks of the release cycle, and these do not
go through the FFe process. Increasing the process overhead for these
removals would only make us less effective at removing them, leaving us with
more unsupported - and unsupportable - packages in each release.

Any given package may be "depended on" by a subset of our users, but if it's
abandonware, that should take precedence; and the outcome shouldn't matter
based on when in the release cycle the removal is requested, if no one is
stepping up to take over the maintenance.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org