On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Alex Alexander <wi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 19:45, Thomas Kahle <to...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm forking from a thread on gentoo-project: >> >> On 17:26 Wed 17 Aug 2011, Markos Chandras wrote: >>> Personally, I want to shrink portage. There is no way for 250 listed >>> developers ( I would be glad if 100 of us were really active ) to >>> maintain thousands of ebuilds. >> [...] >>> We need to support only the packages that we can *really* support and >>> lets hope that more people will join in when they see their packages >>> going away. >> >> I like the idea of shrinking portage, but here's a scenario I'd like to >> avoid: >> >> 1) package A is unmainted, but has a sophistacted ebuild that evolved >> over some time. >> >> 2) A has an open bug that nobody cares to fix, treecleaners come around >> and remove A. >> >> 3) New dev X joines Gentoo and cares for A and startes to rewrite the >> ebuild from scratch. >> >> Is there a way for X to easily query the portage history and dig up the >> ebuild that was there at some point. She could then use the old ebuild >> for their new version, but without efficient search she would probably >> start from scratch. Some packages are treecleaned in the state 'working >> but with a single bug (and nobody cares)', it would be good if that >> state is somehow retained after the removal. Then you can get a fully >> working package while fixing only one bug. >> >> Searching through mailing list archives with automatted removal mails >> would be my hack, what would be yours? >> >> Cheers, >> Thomas > > We could try removing all keywords and masking ebuilds that are > abandoned with bugs but upstream is still active, instead of removing > them completely. That way the ebuild will be there when/if someone > else decides to take care of the package and it will even show in > tools like eix. > > -- > Alex Alexander | wired > + Gentoo Linux Developer > ++ www.linuxized.com > >
+1 on this. It saves the ebuild for posterity AND prevents users hitting nasty bits. This seems to me to beg for a proper well-defined policy, in any case. -- Matthew W. Summers Gentoo Foundation Inc.
