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On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote: |
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> Personally, I want to shrink portage. There is no way for 250 listed |
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> developers ( I would be glad if 100 of us were really active ) to |
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> maintain thousands of ebuilds. I have already said that many many times |
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> and I will say it again. We need to stop pretending that everything is |
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> fine. We need to support only the packages that we can *really* support |
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> and lets hope that more people will join in when they see their packages |
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> going away. |
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|
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I think this depends on your definition of "support." If a package is |
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stale but works fine, I'd prefer to just leave it alone. Obviously a |
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package that is broken or has security bugs should be removed if |
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nobody steps up. |
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|
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Think about the typical use case. The typical user has probably 10-30 |
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applications they REALLY care about, and if they were two years old |
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they'd be upset. |
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|
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However, the typical user probably has 100-200 packages installed on |
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their system, usually as dependencies, or because they do trivial |
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things like display the time in the corner of the screen. Users need |
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these packages and the functionality they bring, but nobody really |
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cares if they're running a 5-year-old version of agetty, slim, or |
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libX11 unless it has a security bug or simply doesn't work with the |
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software they care about. |
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|
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So, I think it is in our interests to leverage the work that has been |
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done in the past. If that version of slim stops working with the |
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latest xfce release, chances are somebody will fix it. If agetty has |
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a security hole, somebody will fix it, and so on. However, merely |
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ditching software simply because it is old reduces the usability of |
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Gentoo without really getting us anything. Those packages cost |
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NOTHING to maintain, since nobody is maintaining them anyway. |
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|
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If we simply drop lots of packages, I don't think users will volunteer |
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in droves to become devs and fix them. More likely, they'll just go |
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elsewhere, and we'll actually end up with fewer devs. |
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|
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I think the average level of quality in Gentoo is adequate. There are |
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a few problem spots that crop up and should be dealt with. However, |
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packages that are simply older than upstream aren't automatically a |
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problem. |
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|
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Rich |