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On Saturday, October 29, 2016 11:44:39 PM EDT M. J. Everitt wrote: |
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> |
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> Whilst this may potentially be a contentious topic (and one that g-p-m |
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> has partially attempted to address) there has been a mildly aggressive |
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> policy applied to treecleaning, whereby if something is old and missing |
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> a maintainer and/or has even minor issues it is likely be nuked without |
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> so much as anyone attempting to solve the issues. Granted, all too often |
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> there IS nobody to address any issues, or outstanding bugs, |
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Its a slippery slope Gentoo is going down. The lack of man power causes many |
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things to go un-maintained. I will not comment on tree-cleaning being right or |
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wrong. Essentially what is taking place at a high level is packages over all |
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are being whittled down package by package due to a lack of man power. |
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Eventually it could reach some equilibrium that the amount of packages is |
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reduced to match the amount of man power to maintain. However it also runs the |
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risk of another downward spiral side effect. |
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The less packages in tree, the less may come to Gentoo. Which may further lead |
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to lack of man power issues in the future. Which means more packages to un- |
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maintained and more have to be cleaned. |
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There is only 1 long term solution to this issue which is to increase man |
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power. Otherwise you end up with such a reduced package set it diminishes the |
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over all benefit. Gentoo would become a further niche distro moving further |
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from mainstream. |
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Or find a way to further automate package maintenance and such, but even that |
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has its limitations. Man power at some point must increase. The amount of |
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software is only increasing worldwide daily exponentially. |
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-- |
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William L. Thomson Jr. |
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