Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Last rites: net-nntp/inn

[Jeremy Olexa]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:36:37 -0500, Richard Freeman <rich0@g.o>
wrote:
> On 01/11/2010 06:30 PM, Arnaud Launay wrote:
>>
>> As a newsmaster, I'm a bit concerned by this.
>
> Yeah, inn seems like a really high-profile package to mask for removal.
>   It would be conspicuous in its absence.
>
> Would it make sense to post on -dev BEFORE masking packages like this?
> I'm sure there are lots of people who would chip in before something
> like this dies.

(A general reply, not targeted towards you, Rich)

Speaking on behalf of the treecleaners:
The fact is, some of us have never heard of "inn" and until Gentoo has
some sort of "popularity tracking" software/tool, the treecleaners will
continue to mask unmaintained software. We can't possible know about every
package in the tree and if it looks like it is unmaintained (open bugs w/o
action) then we will mask it for removal unless someone fixes it and
maintains it.

Let's all move on here and be happy that someone is now maintaining such a
popular package. Thanks jer/rej - I'll add you to metadata so it doesn't
become unmaintained again :) Wasn't there a GSoC project on popularity of
packages? Let's get it implemented already! ;)

-Jeremy

>
> Right now lots of users are going to get errors due to a masked package
> until somebody takes the initiative to fix it.  I suspect that nobody
> wants to poke their head up and risk getting it shot off by doing
> something like that...
>
> Perhaps Gentoo needs a little more of Wikipedia's "Be Bold" attitude and

> a little less of their "delete first and ask questions later" attitude.
>
> Note - I'm not suggesting the problem shouldn't be fixed - I'm just
> suggesting that in this case the solution is worse than the original
> problem.
>
> Rich