Re: 70 inactive GNU packages to be decommis ?

[Jason Self]

On Fri, 2019-09-06 at 09:08 +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> There are too many useless packages on  
> https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html that destracts from the  
> usefull ones.
> 
> I want to promote usefull projects and ideas, now I too often promote
> outdated and/or vague projects with vague descriptions or ideas.

And here lies the problem. You cannot define what is "useful" for
others. You can only define it for yourself.

Whether a program is packaged up for inclusion in one particular distro
and what that one distro shows for their (incomplete) usage statistics
is a partial indicator of popularity only within the context of that
one distro, and not of its overall usefulness. It's best not to
conflate popularity and usefulness, let alone to make decisions of
usefulness based on incomplete information about popularity provided by
a single distro.

I call their reporting incomplete because their package manager does
not report this information by default. A person must specificially opt
in to it, so the information does not report actual usage among all of
those using that distro; only the usage of a subset of people that have
agreed to such reporting. The numbers are therefore necessarily skewed
and not complete.

With free software you can never know how many people have found a given 
program "useful" and have it installed on their computers. There is simply no 
method of tracking this and there is no source of information where it can be 
provided.

I propose that we let this thread drop and instead leave it to the package 
maintainers to raise the issue of decomissioning their own packages though 
normal GNU Project channels should that time ever come.