Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Cc: Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-commits] gentoo-x86 commit in dev-python/PyZilla: PyZilla-0.1.0.ebuild ChangeLog metadata.xml
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:45:35
Message-Id: AANLkTik6BBvKKR8iGQvTc4XAoKCmEh=gwf6RUgaemiKt@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-commits] gentoo-x86 commit in dev-python/PyZilla: PyZilla-0.1.0.ebuild ChangeLog metadata.xml by Nirbheek Chauhan
1 On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@g.o> wrote:
2 > It's really simple:
3 >
4 > (a) If the package has plenty of users, there should be no problems
5 > finding a maintainer or a proxy-maintainer.
6
7 Uh, I guess that's why we are flooded with people wanting to be
8 devs... There are lots of high-use packages that could use more
9 maintainers. I'm not aware of any teams that would turn away help.
10
11 > (b) If the package has few users and is high-maintenance, it's either
12 > already broken, or will get broken soon without a maintainer. Find one
13 > or remove it!
14
15 If it doesn't build, then it can be removed. Nobody is arguing with
16 that. If you think that someday it might not build, then just wait a
17 few months and if you're right you can satisfy your itch to prune the
18 tree...
19
20 > (c) If the package has few users and is low-maintenance, package.mask
21 > it so we can figure out who the users are, and we can get them to
22 > proxy-maintain it, it's so little work anyway, right?
23
24 Uh, package.mask is not intended to be an end-user communication tool.
25 News is slightly better in this respect, but again this is not its
26 purpose.
27
28 We shouldn't be punishing people for not becoming developers. I don't
29 want to use a distro that throws up warning messages every few months
30 because some package I've been using had its developer retire, and I'm
31 a developer. If it breaks and I care enough about it, I'll rescue it.
32 If I'm passionate about it, I'll step in before it breaks. Holding
33 users ransom is not the solution.
34
35 > (d) If the package has very few or no users, what the hell is it doing
36 > unmaintained in the tree? It's just eating up disk inodes and space.
37 >
38
39 Uh, and how much does the inodes, space, and bandwidth consumed by
40 those ~700 m-n packages actually cost. Are we talking about going
41 through wailing and gnashing of teeth so that our stakeholders can
42 save a total of 45 cents worth of disk space across 50 mirrors and
43 50,000 Gentoo boxes over the next 5 years? If one person is getting
44 use out of it, and nobody is getting hurt, and it costs a few inodes,
45 I'm fine with that.
46
47 > We all like to boast about how gentoo has 15,000 packages, but we
48 > neglect to mention that more than 1000 of these are either
49 > unmaintained or very poorly maintained. And this is a very
50 > conservative number.
51
52 I don't know anybody who uses Gentoo because of our huge repository.
53 Sure, compared to LFS it is big. Compared to most major distros,
54 Gentoo isn't all that large. If all somebody wants is a ton of
55 packages they're going to run Debian or whatever. Sure, we have a
56 nice repository and we should be proud of it, but I don't think
57 anybody is trying to over-inflate our repo size just by loading it up
58 with junk.
59
60 The thing I don't understand here is that there seems to be some
61 perception that having stuff in the tree or in Bugzilla costs us
62 something. Sure, at some level it does, and if 99.99% of portage were
63 junk data, then we might have a problem. However, database records
64 and inodes come billions for the dollar. Having a few percent more
65 churn so that we can more gracefully handle the lifecycle of packages
66 doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice. If you're tired of looking at
67 junk when you search bugzilla, then you need to think about how you're
68 searching it. These sorts of arguments come up at work all the time
69 and unless there is some kind of regulatory issue at stake or real
70 loss of revenue associated with lost opportunities, chasing down
71 unnecessary database records to be "tidy" almost always costs far more
72 than it saves.
73
74 I'd be shocked if the total cost to our sponsors in mirror space for
75 m-n packages exceeded the value of time spent by everybody reading
76 this thread. I think we should be practical - I'm all for giving
77 treecleaners a free hand when packages really cause problems, but
78 being anal-retentive just for the sake of doing so doesn't seem to
79 create real value.
80
81 Rich

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