Re: [gentoo-dev] Last rites: app-cdr/sync2d

[Mart Raudsepp]

Ühel kenal päeval, L, 06.06.2020 kell 03:59, kirjutas Ralph Seichter:
> * Christopher Head:
>
> > Not that I care about this specific case, but isn’t the 30-day time
> > period also meant as a nice long warning time for people [...]
>
> Rules and exceptions. I think that shortening the typical 30-day
> period
> is acceptable in specific cases, and sync2d is one of them. According
> to
> Git history, the ebuild for release 1.3 (released 2007) was imported
> in
> August 2015 and no functional changes have been made since then.
> There
> were only meta data updates and stabilisations, and it all ended in
> 2017.
>
> sync2d is unmaintained in Gentoo and based on Python 2, which, as we
> know, was marked for "end of support 2015" which later was extended
> to
> January 2020. Upstream had oodles of time to migrate to Python 3 if
> they
> wanted to. If (!) any Gentoo users are still using sync2d today, they
> also had ample time to choose an alternative. From all appearances,
> sync2d has gone the way of the dodo.
>
> Masking will not uninstall the package, and the sooner people can no
> longer install sync2d without thought, the better, as far as I am
> concerned.

Portage does not provide a good mechanism of warning users that some
package is going or already went away, other than the package.mask
entry triggering such a warning. So if it's removed quickly and p.mask
removed with that, users of said package will not be notified for a
reasonable amount of time to even notice that they have something
unmaintained installed.
Until that is working better, I find it good to have a package.mask
entry for 30 days or even longer. That does not mean the specific
package itself can't go away in 15 days - the package.mask entry could
be reworded and kept for a bit longer.


Mart