Re: [gentoo-dev] Last rites: app-text/cuneiform

[Peter Stuge]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> something is bound to break for good sooner or later if things don't change.

Certainly.

But consider the chain of events:

* user is happily using outdated, but working, software without
  knowing how behind the times upstream really is, because it works
* gentoo masks and removes package

That looks bad.

Masking is a quite invasive UX. It makes a package unavailable by
default *before* the package actually stops working.

Users who want to fix the problem need to get involved upstream,
there is no disagreement about that, but users who have already
gotten a package masked by the powers that be are vastly less
motivated to do so, because the package has already been masked.

Masking communicates that a decision to treeclean has been made.

Masking is not at all communicating an opportunity to address the
perceived problems. That should be done in a different way.

A per-ebuild bug metric would be cool. A kind of health indicator
for individual ebuilds, alerting users when some of our installed
ebuilds go yellow, so that we have perhaps on the order of six
months before the package goes red, at which point it would be fine
to mask at will. Does that make sense? (Obviously how many months
yellow is depends on what else happens in the tree. It's a ballpark
figure.)


//Peter