On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <[email protected]> wrote: > Am Montag, 22. Dezember 2014, 17:20:31 schrieb Andrew Savchenko: > >> And please don't say "just fix it", > > I'm not saying "just fix it", I'm saying "... and of course you will happily > join toolchain team and/or maintain the single gcc version that you need, at > your own pace". >
This really is the basic principle that tends to govern most of these things. This isn't about getting rid of stuff that people want to take care of. This is about not forcing devs to take care of software that they have no desire to take care of. Nobody is preventing anybody from maintaining old versions of gcc/glibc/linux/etc. I'm sure everybody would be happy to work with anybody who is active and doing such things. The problem comes in when people want to hold up stabilization of other packages or changes to eclasses/profiles/etc on the grounds that some ancient version of glibc that nobody is actually bothering to maintain will be broken by the change. If you don't have a policy like this, then people just give up on doing new things with Gentoo, and then all that you have left are people who want the old things but can't be bothered to keep them working. The goal here is to keep the effort required to take Gentoo in a new direction low. That is how we end up with things like Prefix, multilib (in its various forms), multiple init implementations, and so on. As long as somebody makes sure that the old versions of glibc will continue to boot when their dependencies are satisfied, then nobody is going to force anybody to remove them. The onus is just on those who want to keep those packages to ensure that they are maintained. -- Rich
