John Covici wrote: > > I am seeing a lot more unmaintained packages -- at least in the ones I > have -- than there used to be and bugs going unanswered probably > because of that. Not sure what to do about it, I don't have time to > get into doing this much, just keeping up with world updates is quite > time consuming all by itself. >
That may be but the packages that are most used are likely maintained and well maintained at that. There are some old packages that haven't been updated in years, upstream is dead or no one uses them much anymore that are slowly being removed. If one can't install them, no real point in them being in the tree. I might add, the switch from the much older pythons are really forcing a house cleaning. But, some packages are just out of date and something new has taken their place. Nothing new there. I'm sure this happens with every distro out there, even the paid ones. I follow -dev and have recently had to uninstall a package and install something else that is newer and more up to date. I saw a message about that old package that seemed to stop working for me a good while ago. What I had still lurking about would sometimes crash and I didn't trust it. I used to use that as a GUI to manage LVM. I use LVM a lot here. In that message was them removing the old package and recommending a replacement I never heard of. I installed it and it may actually be better than the old software I used to use. While the old package may be gone, the new one seems to be more up to date, stable and appears to have a better design. Different for sure, I'll have to learn how the GUI does its thing but could be better in the end. Since LVM has been updated a good bit in the past year or so, that old software either needed a lot of work or just use the newer software. There are a lot of packages that are just not used by enough people to maintain them anymore. Some are being replaced with more up to date packages. There are lots of reasons for that. If a package you use is being removed, search -dev and look to see if there is a replacement mentioned in the last rites message. If it was removed, they almost always include a replacement if there is one. Sometimes another package absorbs what the old package used to do. While at times -dev can get quite busy, I'd be lost without it. Things are mentioned there about upcoming changes that I don't see mentioned anywhere else. That includes this list as well. It's a great way to keep somewhat up to date on what's going on. One doesn't have to read every post either. After a while, you can tell by the subject line if that thread will be anything you would be interested in. Last rites, things about upgrades and such get my attention. I generally know when something big is going to happen weeks or even months before it hits the tree. If you want to share what packages you are missing out on, I'd be glad to search my -dev archives and see if I can find something that may help. Dale :-) :-)
