Hi, Some weeks ago the nixpkgs monitor[1] started to work again and the numbers there are worrying. I inline the numbers at the bottom.
Now, there are 2000+ outdated packages with maintainers listed and 1000 outdated without maintainers at all (and the 1600 whose status we don't know). Even if somehow half of these are false-positives (which they aren't), that's still a huge number. It is difficult to try to make a dent in that number as an individual and we don't have that many people actively maintaining the things they are listed under. I'd like to propose a system like Gentoo's, the herd system. Basically we split up packages up by categories and assign maintainer group to each category. For example, we might have something like Haskell packages – Haskell maintainer group games – games maintainer group Python packages – Python maintainer group emulators – … … and so on. We then recruit/encourage people to join the groups they are interested in. This means that rather than a single person maintaining some packages and being single point of failure, we now have multiple people maintaining a larger pool of packages. It is then easy to ask questions like ‘what games are outdated?’. Of course this can be implemented alongside the existing system of listed individual maintainers. It also gives us the benefit of being able to look at each group and say ‘oh, games don't have any maintainers, we should look for some people to do that’ which is currently very difficult. It's also much easier to ensure the groups remain active as opposed to having to chase down each individual maintainer listed on each package. At the beginning it will simply transform the problem of ‘we need to find maintainers for 2000 packages’ to ‘we need to find maintainers for 10 groups’. Groups can then simply use the monitor to see which packages become outdated with hopes that someone in the group makes the update. What do you think? I think something like this is inevitable with the ever-growing number of packages and users or we end up with the situation like we have today, with thousands of outdated packages without maintainers or with inactive/busy maintainers listed. The changes required would be to categorise packages we have (easy, simply go by how nixpkgs is organised), assign a group (an e-mail address, perhaps a mailing list or something) to each and go through each expression to add the respective group's e-mail. Thanks! Current numbers: Packages # Potentially vulnerable 234 Unmaintained not covered 1691 Outdated unmaintained 1048 Outdated 2143 Maintainers Packages 0 4347 1 2065 2 743 3 254 4 268 5 1 [1]: http://monitor.nixos.org [2]: http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/herds-and-projects/ -- Mateusz K. _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev