Unmaintained Packages in universe, was: Tor Packages

[Reinhard Tartler]

Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> writes:

> The problem isn't that the packages are in Ubuntu, but that they
> aren't maintained.

This raises an interesting topic. How do we want to deal with the
situation where upstream asks a distribution to remove the packages,
because the level of maintenance doesn't fit upstream's expectations?

Tor is not the only example here. Prominent other examples include ion3,
but I'm sure there are many other packages as well.

Granted, the problem isn't that widespread (yet). However, given that
our current policy for universe is the make it easy to get software in,
I fear that this situation will worsen, because that policy seduces
contributors to upload packages to revu (and then have them sponsored
for universe) and forget about them later.

I see 2 approaches:

  - remove them on upstream request
  - move them to some PPA, which is not bound to Freezes, Releases, etc.


-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4