[gentoo-dev] "frozen" overlay Re: Please stop useless removals

[Michael Weber]

On 02/01/2013 09:21 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Vaeth
> <vaeth@××××××××××××××××××××××××.de> wrote:
>>
>>>>    # Upstream is dead and gone.
>>>>    # Masked for removal on 20130302
>>>
>>>
>>> Erm, so this is the _only_ reason - dead upstream?
>>
> If folks do not want to maintain it anymore, then it will be removed.
> Feel free to contribute to Gentoo and maintain the packages.

Hereby done, becoming a dev is a big step for just one package a user
would keep.

Ihmo, what you call "upstream dead" is a kind of positive situation.

If the author has no longer time to contribute (we all have a real life)
then it's ok, no need to wipe his contribution from the face of the world.

If the software is just working as the author intendend, and it has no
major bugs, then there's no need to do further trivial releases just to
keep the disto maintainers busy.

If it's broken, uncompatible and nobody steps up, drop it, agreed.


>> You are destroying the charme of gentoo by systematically
>> removing all these little tools and toys.  The availability
>> of a lot of software was once a strength of gentoo, so removing
>> these things is really bad, especially if it happens for no
>> real reason.

We need to maintain a certain quality. Sheer mass does has no charm, if
nothing works. But I'd rather like to see gentoo as a broad selection of
tools, that build. maybe some really cool stuff nobody else has.

> Gentoo is not a software archival service.
>> I was understanding if e.g. someting was removed which needs
>> the <gtk-2 or <qt-4 framework or something similar and had
>> a dead upstream. But just needing a small tool like imake (xboing)
>> or having open feature requestes (epm) or even nothing and
>> just dead upstream is IMHO really not a reason.
>>
>> If something really does not compile anymore and nobody cares,
>> then remove keywords (or, for god's sake, mask it);
>> if something might theoretically become a security issue (xpdf)
>> then it should be masked.
>>
>> But please do not throw things out of the tree unless
>> really necessary:
>>
>> It does not hurt anybody to have such package in the tree,
>> but removing it - especially if upstream is dead - means
>> that the tarbalös will be removed from the mirrors and thus
>> nobody is able anymore to install it (even if he would care and
>> fix some minor issues) unless he had kept a copy on
>> his local machine (which will mean in the future that he can only
>> do it if he had used gentoo already many years ago and cared
>> during the time of the removal).
>
> Again I highly recommend archiving the software yourself; but I don't
> think Gentoo should be doing it.

It costs resources:
 - distfiles and all their mirrors accumulate
 - emerge dependency calculation

If it's out-waged by increasing disc capacity and processor power is up
to discussion.

Last but not least, we have gattered some extra info besides the
tarballs, our precious ebuild scripts. Which is why I started my
involvement with Gentoo (maybe somebody should have told me about BSDs
tree before that).

As Martin said, tarballs get lost. I steal them from debian mirror on a
regular basis, maybe we should contribute ourselves.

PROPOSAL

  Let's create an overlay "frozen stuff" which contains all the
  software no longer developed with following features:

    Users showed interest in having them

    Web-presence to be picked up on Google search.
       (viewvc.cgi show dead is kinda hidden [1])

    Separate distfile mirror
       no need to stress our mirror peers
       make it a sepearate repo,
          feed by upstream and mirror://gentoo
       I can contribute the space/bandwith.

    Feedback/Bugs/Voting can be handled inside b.g.o
       no need for extra login,
       frozen-bugs can be auto-generated,
       whitelist [frozen]
       just like the sunrise tracker bugs.

BENEFIT

   User can choose whether or not layman -a frozen.

   Non-trivial ebuilds are preserved.

   Tarballs are preserved.

   Nobody gets hurt.

Comments?


[1] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/

-- 
Michael Weber
Gentoo Developer
web: https://xmw.de/
mailto: Michael Weber <xmw@g.o>