Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Steve Dibb <beandog@g.o>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] What to do if packages are old?
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:14:54
Message-Id: 456F1E12.40909@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] What to do if packages are old? by Hans de Hartog
1 Hans de Hartog wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 >
4 > I'm currently evaluating some exotic packages in the portage tree
5 > and found out that they're almost 2 years old, don't compile or
6 > crash immediately.
7 > When I go to their home page or forums, I see that lots of new
8 > versions have been released.
9 >
10 > What to do about this? I'm not going back to the early 90's to
11 > play around with tarballs, ./configure, make && make install and
12 > after a few months end up in the hell of shared library
13 > dependencies and systems being polluted beyond repair.
14 >
15 > After all, that's why I've choosen Gentoo in the first place.
16 >
17 > Should I
18 > - kindly ask somebody to do something about it?
19 > - try to make an ebuild from a tarball?
20 > - something else?
21 Check bugzilla to see if there are version bumps + ebuild bugs in there
22 already. Most of the time, maintainers leave, and the herds are left to
23 take care of them. If no one in the herd is interested in the package,
24 then things can stagnate.
25
26 If there isn't a bug, feel free to file one. If you have some ebuild
27 skillz and want to help maintain the ebuild, then let some developers
28 know that you'd be willing to take care of the package. Or, look at
29 project Sunrise as well.
30
31 There's a lot of things that can be done, and I've just barely glossed
32 over the basics. Most of the time it comes down to a per-package basis,
33 and usually the case is that there's just no one interested in
34 maintaining it.
35
36 Steve
37 --
38 gentoo-user@g.o mailing list