[gentoo-dev] Re: Please stop useless removals

[Richard Yao]

On 02/01/2013 02:36 AM, Vaeth wrote:
>
>>>    # Upstream is dead and gone.
>>>    # Masked for removal on 20130302
>>
>> Erm, so this is the _only_ reason - dead upstream?
>
> ++
>
> Please, please, stop removing packages for no reason!
> This happens now way too often:
>
> app-dicts/ispell*
> app-portage/epm
> app-text/ispell
> games-arcade/bitefusion
> games-arcade/xboing
> games-action/trackballs
> games-emulation/xmame
> ...
>
> These are just some of the previous examples which I remember
> because I had to put them in my local overlay.
>
> None of these removals alone was so valuable to me that I saw
> a reason to step up, but the removals for no reasons accumulate
> previously so much that I see the need to say something:
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> (If the resources are an argument: I am not speaking about monster
> packages taking gigabytes of data - these might need to be
> discussed separately - but mainly about reasonably sized packages
> which even if summed up do not take much data).
>
> Regards
> Martin

I suspect that the removal message is inaccurate. The actual reason for
removal is the following:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425298

If you were to make a webpage for it and host the tarball for people, it
should be possible to resolve that bug. That should be sufficient to
have the removal mask removed. I suspect that the Anapnea network will
be more than happy to provide you with hosting for this:

http://www.anapnea.net/