Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Vaeth
<vaeth@××××××××××××××××××××××××.de> wrote:
> Yep!  That's the right attitude: Give the people 30 days (even those
> people who are currently not at Gentoo for whatever reason) to know
> years in advance all the software they might ever need and tell them,
> if in doubt, just to maintain hundreds of packages!
> It is *of course* their fault if they do not!
> Later, if they need a package, you can blame them that they have
> not voluntereered for all these packages they possibly might have needed,
> because years ago they had 30 days time to think about it (even longer
> if they took the time and resources to backup on their machines all
> tarballs of all packages).

If the package gets masked and you want to keep it around, just fetch
the tarball (which should still be on the mirrors) and copy the ebuild
to your own overlay.

For you personally, there is no longer a crisis.  Now, if you want the
rest of the world to benefit from your work you can publish that
overlay and stick the distfile somewhere public.

You're welcome to get somebody to help you proxy-maintain the package
in the tree as well.  If the only thing wrong with the package is the
missing SRC_URI you shouldn't have too much trouble finding somebody
willing to do the commit.

Creating a long-term repository for upstream tarballs even after we
drop the package is not a trivial job.  There would be considerable
space requirements, and there are legal issues as well (since they
aren't maintained nobody is looking for license issues/etc).  There
are many packages in the tree with RESTRICT=mirror and those we can't
do anything for in any case.

Sure, the road to becoming a dev is a long one, but NOBODY needs
PERMISSION to contribute to Gentoo.  Anybody can submit patches, and
anybody can run their own overlay.  In most distros this is a much
more common practice.  Go look up your favorite piece of software and
you'll probably find their instructions for installing it on Gentoo
start out by adding another repository to your configuration - they
couldn't even get Ubuntu to carry their package despite having done
all the work for them.

With services like github and such it really doesn't take that much
work to set up your own overlay.  If you do that you can package
whatever you want and nobody will tell you that you're in violation of
any rules.  Gentoo really is an empowering distro.

However, manpower is tight at Gentoo, and we're all volunteers.  You
can't just yell at devs and tell them to do more work.  It won't get
you very far.

Rich