Rich Freeman wrote: > I get what you're saying, though there is still a cost to leaving the > bug open to years. In this case it means an old package stays in the > tree marked as stable. That either costs maintainers the effort to > keep it work, or they don't bother to keep in working in which case > users get saddled with issues.
Since it's not possible to force anyone to keep old packages working when the rest of a system has been upgraded this is hard to solve. If reality is that a package is in the tree but there is no stable version which works in an otherwise updated system then I think it's accurate to have an open bug. If nobody makes the package work then there seem to be two options; either leave the bug open until someone makes things work again, or to remove the package from portage and close the bug as WONTFIX. But even if a given package is removed from portage the old stable version is still installed on the user's system. //Peter
