On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 12:53:06PM -0500, Nick Accad via Talk wrote:
Recently I have been noticing that more and more of my daily-use packages in Debian are old.
I am not talking about stuff in "Stable" where versions are not upgraded but fixes are backported, I am using Sid as my main workstation, and some stuff is really old
Example is rssguard, in Debian (any release), it is stuck on version 4.0.4, github is on 4.8.6.
I started digging, and I found out that there are over 4000 packages in Debian that are either orphared, or the maintainer is asking for help.
This is not sustainable, I tried looking into taking over a simple package, and honestly got overwhelmed, mostly because I am not a programmer in any way.
This is not just Debian, but any Debian derivative, including Ubuntu and its derivatives.
Take a look at https://wnpp.debian.net/ for a full list, see the packages that are orphaned and without owner, that is almost 1300. Admittedly, not all of them are critical or even important, but it should be a reason for concern.
The immediate solution for me is to use flatpaks. I find myself relying more and more on flatpaks or external repos. On my desktop is not really an issue, but I keep having nightmares about possible security problems.
The other option is of course to switch to something else, either Fedora and derivatives, or Arch and derivatives, but honestly after 20+ years of Debian, I am the old man who has no patience for new toys.
In short, Debian needs help, if you have the knowledge and the time, please consider taking over something.
To have a package of some software it generally requires someone to care about it to maintain it. Unfortunately it would appear the person that cared about rssguard and uses it has left Debian due to some disagreements back in 2018. Something about Code of Conduct violation. So as a result whatever he worked on maintaining is not longer done by him. Many of the packages got new maintainers (I believe he worked on KDE for example), but some did not. Looking at popcon in debian, akregator has 29572 installs, while rssguard has 118. Is that because akregator is better or because rssguard is out of date or does something depend on akregator and pulle it in automatically? It looks like kde-standard depends on it, so that probably means the numbers for it are meaningless. -- Len Sorensen