On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 02:36:26PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs via blfs-dev wrote:
> Over the years, BLFS has grown a lot. There are over 1000 individual
> tarballs listed in the book. This creates a large maintenance burden. It is
> a rare week when we have less than 30 new packages that need to be updated.
>
> The most time intensive process is preparing for our semi-annual release.
> This is a two week process that provides quality control to ensure all
> packages build with current libraries and support programs. If packages are
> not kept up to date at other times, the time for the release process will
> grow significantly. In addition, during the time of release processing, new
> packages continue to be released.
>
Quality control is not an "only do it just before the release"
thing. Sure, picking up recent breakage, or perhaps issues with
certain combinations of packages, happens then - but we should be
trying to ensure that the book usually builds.
And by the same token, if a change in the svn book breaks things
then people need to report it.
> To try to alleviate this problem, I am proposing that we remove some
> packages from LFS. The list below is my initial proposal of packages that
> are less frequently needed by users and are not worth maintaining by BLFS.
> These packages are user level programs and do not include libraries.
> Removal of libraries that are only used by these packages will follow.
>
> If I do not hear of any objections, I intend to start removing these
> packages around October 1st.
>
> I'm also open to nominations for removal of other packages.
>
KDE (that was a joke, even though I don't understand how people can
comfortably use plasma, but some of the add-ons like opencv seem
more trouble than they are worth).
> -- Bruce
>
Generally I agree with Thomas's reply. But a few comments on
specific packages -
> MC-4.8.21
It always amazes me when I see this mentioned in support issues, but
I think there are a group of old-time linux users, possibly in
Russia, who use it.
> NcFTP-3.2.6
No objections to this one - I used to use it a lot, but the last
time I used it was in pre-release testing. General ftp is becoming
defunct.
> sendmail-8.15.2
Should have been gone years ago - people who came from BSD and
learned how to use it should be fine, but for everyone else it is
too much pain.
> IceWM-1.4.2
Ouch! ;-)
> feh-2.27.1
Displaying a group of images isn't something I often do, and for me
running 'display *.jpg' or similar works. But this package seems to
work ok. OTOH we could get rid of one perl module.
> FontForge-20170731
Was required by a KDE font, but has not been needed for ages.
> Pidgin-2.13.0
> Transmission-2.94
> xarchiver-0.5.4
I never use those except to test the book.
> Transcode-1.1.7
The maintenance overhead is mainly from new major versions of
ffmpeg. At one point I think I was only building tccat, can't
remember if that needed any patches.
> Audacious-3.10
You don't like playing music ?
> MuPDF-1.13.0
For mupdf, the more PDF viewers, the better.
ĸen
--
Tout est bien, tout va bien, tout va pour le mieux qu'il soit possible
-- Candide, de Voltaire
(Everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds)
--
http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html
Unsubscribe: See the above information page
