Re: criteria for acceptable languages for central QA tools in Debian (was: Re: coordination between lintian/piuparts/adequate)

On Wed Dec 11, 2024 at 10:57 PM GMT, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
> I'd like to discuss this with a focus on general principles, and only 
> discuss specifics (adequate, golang) to the extent that it helps 
> reason about general principles.

That's going to be pretty hard, because the scenario you present is 
still pretty specific.

> so we have a qa testing package that was written 11y ago in perl, and 
> has been orphaned for almost all of that time (10y!). it's not 
> critical but it does serve a purpose, and it's therefore nonideal that 
> it's been orphaned for so long.

Certainly non-ideal. "Orphaned" does not give the full picture about the 
state of the package, however: It could describe a package with critical 
bugs that aren't getting fixed, or nobody doing any QA or NMU uploads of 
it ever. Neither looks true for adequate.

> someone takes it over and rewrites it in a language that runs in all 
> supported arches, and likely in many ports too as long as they keep up 
> with a relatively recent version of the language (in this case, a 
> version released 1.5y ago).

"likely in many ports too" is dancing around the fact that it *doesn't* 
run on at least one port, hence Holger's complaint.

An orphaned/unmaintained-but-functional package was still serving some 
purpose and was available, and by uploading a rewrite in Go, it became 
unavailable. That is a shame (how significant this is, is up for debate)

If you'd chosen to upload "adequate-ng" instead, this wouldn't have 
happened, although, there would be plenty of drawbacks to that too.

We're discussing the drawbacks of what you did, but I must acknowledge 
the benefits too: you've adopted a package, following the correct 
procedures, and (in many other respects) improved it. Thanks!

You also made an effort to reach out to users and stakeholders before 
you took the action, which was a good idea.

> on a meta level: I find it incredible that this conversation needs to 
> be had at all, given the increasing median age of Debian contributors, 
> and the limited popularity of perl among younger people

The "Perl Problem" is a wider issue we should explore in much more 
depth. I'm personally a little surprised if it's true that younger 
people are unprepared to take a stab at hacking Perl. But since that's 
the case, we have deeply embedded, critical stuff written in Perl 
everywhere. "adequate" is but the tip of the iceberg.



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👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
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