Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Time to lastrite compiz AND blender due to lack of maintainer & broken

[Alexandre Rostovtsev]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@g.o> wrote:
> I don't think that will cut it... It's not the only unhandled compiz bug
> in tree[1]. Not sure why it should be given any special status, if it's
> not maintained and broken, it should just be punted.
>
> Also blender should go, since we have had nothing usable in tree for a
> while[2].
>
> [1] http://tinyurl.com/css37zx
> [2] http://tinyurl.com/ckur2jz

IMHO, punting a high-profile, widely-used package like blender is an
option of last resort. It's not something we can do if gentoo wants to
continue calling itself a major distro. As for "nothing usable in
tree", most of the bugs are about optional USE-flag controlled
features and/or the ancient 2.4x releases. Blender-2.57 with
USE=-ffmpeg builds and runs fine.

A real issue is that gentoo ships patches to improve blender security
defaults that upstream apparently does not care much about (see
http://lwn.net/Articles/452273/), and therefore these patches have to
be updated on every version bump, which increases maintenance burden
and delays getting new versions in portage - new versions that may
well contain fixes for the bugs in Samuli's list. Given the lack of
manpower for maintaining blender, perhaps replacing the patches with a
big ewarn in pkg_postinst might be a less bad longterm solution.

In any case, comment 14 of bug #382097 seems to indicate that at least
one person will be willing to maintain blender starting in January
2012.

-Alexandre.