On Tue, 6 Mar 2018 14:13:11 -0800 Matt Turner <matts...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> The long tail of packages were packages that by definition didn't > require any maintenance or add to our collective cognitive overhead. > :) In some cases, they "didn't require maintenance" because nobody was using them. And because nobody was using them, nobody realised they were broken. Subsequently, the "has old EAPI" is a good indicator in some cases of "this package has not seen love in a while, and is probably broken" Revisiting old packages like this root out real problems, like "oh, this is so broken, it silently installed but didn't run at all for 3 years...." Which won't become apparent until some poor user attempts to use it, and at that point, you *hope* they file a bug. So the resulting re-stabilization ends up forcibly expanding the test audience, reaffirming "this package that nobody has glanced at for 5+ years still works on every platform we said it did", which is probably an important thing to be able to state when a package is deemed 'stable'.
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