Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of unmaintained packages in Gentoo

Hi,

December 20, 2017 5:46 PM, "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> E. Some of the unmaintained packages are dependencies of other
> maintained packages in Gentoo. However, developers usually don't want
> to take them, even if their package is the only revdep.
>
> F. We are usually treecleaning packages as they become severely outdated
> and broken. However, that takes serious amount of work too and usually
> results in a lot of hostility from other developers (who don't want to
> maintain the package in question) and users.
>
> G. In the past, I've attempted to evaluate the status of projects and to
> clean some dead up. However, it's a lot of manual labor and it meets
> with hostility from some of the Gentoo developers.
>
> H. For most things related to determining developer inactivity, we have
> little to no automation. It's easy to tell when a developer stops
> committing altogether but we have no special help in e.g. determining
> that some packages are effectively unmaintained (and that would of
> course meet with hostility).

I believe there was some work in progress about automating check for new upstream version (via
repology api I think).
Couldn't this be used to check for maintainer abandon? Some bugs can't always be solved easily, so
you can't take that into account to check for inactivity, but not adding new versions is, IMO, a
sign that the maintainer doesn’t check often enough for updates.
We could also send automatic mail a month (arbitrary choice) after a new version has been released
upstream to the maintainer for the related ebuild with such a system, so that maintainers don't
have to bother about that part anymore.

I can't remember what was called the project but what's its current status?
I don't know if a solution like that would change much to the situation, but I believe it should
give us better insights about the state of the tree.

Best regards,
--
Corentin “Nado” Pazdera