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On Friday, September 16, 2016 09:54:42 PM Duncan wrote: |
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> Kristian Fiskerstrand posted on Fri, 16 Sep 2016 14:58:22 +0200 as |
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> |
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> excerpted: |
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> > On 09/16/2016 02:31 PM, Hanno Böck wrote: |
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> >> media-gfx/skencil is a python-written vector graphics tool. It was once |
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> >> popular before inkscape became the de-facto-standard. It hasn't seen |
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> >> any upstream activity for a decade(!), but surprisingly it still seems |
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> >> to work. |
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> >> |
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> >> I haven't used it for many years myself. |
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> >> |
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> >> There are 4 open bugs in bugzilla. |
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> >> |
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> >> Anyone interested in taking it? (else the usual: will be reassigned to |
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> >> maintainer-needed) |
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> > |
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> > Also sounds like a candidate for treecleaning / moving to an overlay and |
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> > not keeping non-upstream maintained things in tree if nobody want to |
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> > take the maintainer burden of it. |
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> |
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> Why treeclean it, if it still works and can still be built against in- |
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> tree python? |
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> |
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> Sometimes mature packages don't get further maintenance because they |
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> "just work" as they are, and don't _need_ to eventually be bloated to |
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> include email and browsing functionality or whatever. |
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> |
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> Of course if it requires old python and eventually the last supported in- |
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> tree python is being removed, and nobody steps up to update it then, |
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> /then/ it should be removed from the tree as it'll be broken /then/, but |
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> that's not the case now, as Hanno explicitly said it still seems to work. |
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|
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It needs a maintainer. Are you offering? |
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|
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Packages without maintainers anywhere along the line (either local or |
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upstream) risk having security vulnerabilities go unfixed (or even |
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unacknowledged) simply from having nobody who actually cares about the |
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package. Very little "just works", even if it appears to, after a decade or |
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two of little to no modifications or maintenance, if only because hidden |
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assumptions the software makes about its environment cease to hold true. |
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So long as it continues to "just work", the work involved in being a proxy |
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maintainer should be next to nil. If it doesn't continue to just work, then at |
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least you have a better idea about what's going on...you might even find |
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effective ways to deal with the problem, either by fixing the package yourself |
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or providing backpressure on the environment changes that have broken (or |
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threaten to break) it. |
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|
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-- |
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:wq |
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