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

[Arnaud Launay]

Le Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:37:19PM +0000, Duncan a écrit:
> FWIW, I feel for the treecleaners.  It's a job with little
> thanks and lots of chance to make someone mad at you, but I'm
> glad /someone's/ doing it! =:^)

Yeah. I'm glad each time I see old things getting deleted,
abandoned software and such. So, yeah, thanks, treecleaners.
Your job is as easy as a sysadmin's one: no one knows you exist,
except when someone needs to scream at you...

> In the case of the INNs of the tree, that should prevent
> masking entirely, since popular packages will certainly have
> someone raising the roof on just the warning, within a day or
> two.  That was certainly the case here.  No masking means
> ordinary users won't have to ever know it happened.

Well, as it happens, I knew it was being masked because I got the
mail warning from gentoo-dev-announce, which is unfortunately a
bit badly advertised.

Anyway, I would have scratched my head far, far more if I had to
understand WTF portage would complain about an inn masked... I
don't care when it's small, unused package -- last time it was
lprof, and I didn't really care, it was a bit still here from a
package I installed years ago, and which passed through depclean.

So, what about something like:
* mail on gentoo-dev-announce, saying "heads up. mask in one week"
* one week later, mask and "classical" mail "foo/bar masked"

I have absolutely no idea how much work it requires, so I won't
complain if TC says it's too complicated/unpratical/etc.

BTW, I have no knowledge of the concept of proxy-maintainer, I'll
look at it tomorrow, it's 2am here... :)  I don't even think I
ever heard of it before, but I didn't brush my gentoo-fu for a
few years, that may explain...

	Arnaud.