[WastingMyTime89]

Still a gigantic waste of everyone time.

They could just have kept which has it has been for more than a decade and nothing would have happened. That's the decision that prevailed in the end but the fact that it had to go all the way to the Technical Committee before sanity prevailed says a lot about the utter madness of the Debian development process.

[ysavir]

My take away is that they have a great system which allowed for voices to be heard, perspectives to be presented, and for an ultimate decision made in the best interest of Debian users. Doesn't seem a waste of time to me.

[NovemberWhiskey]

This view can be summarized as "why can't the package maintainers just do the right thing themselves all the time and get along with everybody?" which is just an astonishing question to someone who has actually worked with other humans.

[buitreVirtual]

If there wasn't a committee, the change would have been made and a lot of people would have suffered. In this particular case, the time spent in following the process is negligible compared to the damage this change would have caused.

[belorn]

The maintainer wanted to no longer support a part of their package. In almost every single situation this would have a natural result with the maintainer stopping to support the thing they don't want to spend their volunteer time on and any other developer who want to support it could pick it up.

It is actually a bit insane that the committee is forcing a developer to support something against their will in a project based on volunteers. It is basically an artifact of the concept of essential packages and an situation where multiple different versions could cause instability, and so until the program can be moved to a different essential package the best move for the project was to keep things as they were.

[rwmj]

> Still a gigantic waste of everyone time.

It's a voluntary organization, I guess people enjoy this, and the decision was taken in the open. There are worse things in the world right now :-)

[wolverine876]

> gigantic waste of everyone time

Debian is extraordinarily successful, so the time seems well spent. Who here has managed an equally successful project?

[kevin_thibedeau]

I don't get why they can't switch to GNU which and put it in whatever package it harmonizes with. Throwing out deprecation notices for core utilities is irresponsible.