A proposal for better quality in maintenance of packages by reducing scope

["Léo Le Bouter" <lle-bout@zaclys.net>]

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Hello!

There's lots of packages in GNU Guix and maintaining all of them is
tedious, even if we have tooling, there's only so much we can do.

I want to have a secure and reliable system, I would also like to only
depend on packages I know are easy to maintain for GNU Guix
contributors.

I would like to propose that we reduce the scope of the maintenance we
do in GNU Guix and establish a list of packages that we more or less
commit to maintaining because this is something that we can do and is
attainable, for example, we could remove desktop environments that we
can't maintain to good standards realistically and focus our efforts on
upstreams that don't go against our way of doing things, that are
cooperative, that provide good build systems we can rely on for our
purposes, etc.

I propose we also add some requirements before packages can go into
such a maintained state, like a working and reliable updater/refresher
with notifications directed to some mailing list when that one finds a
new release, a reduced amount of downstream patches and a cooperative
upstream with who we preferably have some point of contact to solve
issues or gather more insider knowledge about the software if we need,
a working and reliable CVE linter with proper cpe-name/vendor and
notifications going to a mailing list we all subscribe to, etc..
probably lots of other things are relevant but you see the idea.

It should also be possible to filter out packages that are not declared
to be in this maintained state, for example, in the GNU Guix System
configuration.

Some kind of quality rating for packages that users can trust.

What do you think?

Léo

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