Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Alec Warner <antarus@g.o>
To: Gentoo Dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Package up for grabs: skencil
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2016 02:06:22
Message-Id: CAAr7Pr9kSA5L-sCzUMj1LNeRzXewnEm+pWkVRq2qiGJJeknkkg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Package up for grabs: skencil by Michael Mol
1 On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote:
2
3 > On Friday, September 16, 2016 09:54:42 PM Duncan wrote:
4 > > Kristian Fiskerstrand posted on Fri, 16 Sep 2016 14:58:22 +0200 as
5 > >
6 > > excerpted:
7 > > > On 09/16/2016 02:31 PM, Hanno Böck wrote:
8 > > >> media-gfx/skencil is a python-written vector graphics tool. It was
9 > once
10 > > >> popular before inkscape became the de-facto-standard. It hasn't seen
11 > > >> any upstream activity for a decade(!), but surprisingly it still seems
12 > > >> to work.
13 > > >>
14 > > >> I haven't used it for many years myself.
15 > > >>
16 > > >> There are 4 open bugs in bugzilla.
17 > > >>
18 > > >> Anyone interested in taking it? (else the usual: will be reassigned to
19 > > >> maintainer-needed)
20 > > >
21 > > > Also sounds like a candidate for treecleaning / moving to an overlay
22 > and
23 > > > not keeping non-upstream maintained things in tree if nobody want to
24 > > > take the maintainer burden of it.
25 > >
26 > > Why treeclean it, if it still works and can still be built against in-
27 > > tree python?
28 > >
29 > > Sometimes mature packages don't get further maintenance because they
30 > > "just work" as they are, and don't _need_ to eventually be bloated to
31 > > include email and browsing functionality or whatever.
32 > >
33 > > Of course if it requires old python and eventually the last supported in-
34 > > tree python is being removed, and nobody steps up to update it then,
35 > > /then/ it should be removed from the tree as it'll be broken /then/, but
36 > > that's not the case now, as Hanno explicitly said it still seems to work.
37 >
38 > It needs a maintainer. Are you offering?
39 >
40 > Packages without maintainers anywhere along the line (either local or
41 > upstream) risk having security vulnerabilities go unfixed (or even
42 > unacknowledged) simply from having nobody who actually cares about the
43 > package. Very little "just works", even if it appears to, after a decade or
44 > two of little to no modifications or maintenance, if only because hidden
45 > assumptions the software makes about its environment cease to hold true.
46 >
47 >
48 The current policy is to not remove stuff unless it is actually broken.
49
50 -A
51
52
53
54 > So long as it continues to "just work", the work involved in being a proxy
55 > maintainer should be next to nil. If it doesn't continue to just work,
56 > then at
57 > least you have a better idea about what's going on...you might even find
58 > effective ways to deal with the problem, either by fixing the package
59 > yourself
60 > or providing backpressure on the environment changes that have broken (or
61 > threaten to break) it.
62 >
63 > --
64 > :wq

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-dev] Re: Package up for grabs: skencil Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>