On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 17:50 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:57:23 -0500
> Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@g.o> wrote:
> > This is not about arches just being slackers.  This is about arches
> > denying stable (or even ~) for some reason.  If I cannot drop an old
> > version of something just because the new version doesn't (and won't)
> > work on an arch, that's really bad for me.
> 
> What is the cost of keeping it there and not changing it?
> 

Assuming no one ever uses it?  Just some sync bandwidth, emerge think
time, and disk space.  Not a lot.  However, if people use it, and
especially if they manage to get mixed versions of gnome with it (or new
versions of apps built against it), then we get lots of bugs about it.
Generally, we tend to get lots of interaction bugs about old versions of
gnome.  That's why we try to remove them.

One of the biggest problems is packages not having the correct upstream
deps, since upstream and most distros have moved on to new versions of
gnome.  There's no way we can catch those (since we, too, have moved on
to new versions) and users find them and report them.  Most users I've
encountered don't do --deep upgrades, ever.

I suppose a possible solution would be to de-keyword all those old
versions for all other arches.  That would reduce such reported bugs to
users of the arch in question.  It still leaves something unmaintained
(and probably unmaintainable, except maybe on the target arch) in the
tree marked as stable.  That's a bad thing in-and-of itself.

Daniel