Re: Please stop useless removals (was: [gentoo-dev] last rites: games-arcade/bitefusion)
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Vaeth va...@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de wrote: # Upstream is dead and gone. # Masked for removal on 20130302 Erm, so this is the _only_ reason - dead upstream? ++ Please, please, stop removing packages for no reason! This happens now way too often: app-dicts/ispell* app-portage/epm app-text/ispell games-arcade/bitefusion games-arcade/xboing games-action/trackballs games-emulation/xmame ... These are just some of the previous examples which I remember because I had to put them in my local overlay. None of these removals alone was so valuable to me that I saw a reason to step up, but the removals for no reasons accumulate previously so much that I see the need to say something: If folks do not want to maintain it anymore, then it will be removed. Feel free to contribute to Gentoo and maintain the packages. You are destroying the charme of gentoo by systematically removing all these little tools and toys. The availability of a lot of software was once a strength of gentoo, so removing these things is really bad, especially if it happens for no real reason. Gentoo is not a software archival service. I was understanding if e.g. someting was removed which needs the gtk-2 or qt-4 framework or something similar and had a dead upstream. But just needing a small tool like imake (xboing) or having open feature requestes (epm) or even nothing and just dead upstream is IMHO really not a reason. If something really does not compile anymore and nobody cares, then remove keywords (or, for god's sake, mask it); if something might theoretically become a security issue (xpdf) then it should be masked. But please do not throw things out of the tree unless really necessary: It does not hurt anybody to have such package in the tree, but removing it - especially if upstream is dead - means that the tarbalös will be removed from the mirrors and thus nobody is able anymore to install it (even if he would care and fix some minor issues) unless he had kept a copy on his local machine (which will mean in the future that he can only do it if he had used gentoo already many years ago and cared during the time of the removal). Again I highly recommend archiving the software yourself; but I don't think Gentoo should be doing it. -A (If the resources are an argument: I am not speaking about monster packages taking gigabytes of data - these might need to be discussed separately - but mainly about reasonably sized packages which even if summed up do not take much data). Regards Martin
Re: Please stop useless removals (was: [gentoo-dev] last rites: games-arcade/bitefusion)
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:21 AM, Alec Warner anta...@gentoo.org wrote: On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Vaeth va...@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de wrote: Please, please, stop removing packages for no reason! This happens now way too often: If folks do not want to maintain it anymore, then it will be removed. Feel free to contribute to Gentoo and maintain the packages. I think this makes sense, IFF there is something fundamentally wrong with the package. Being unmaintained in and of itself is not something fundamentally wrong with the package. Having a few open bugs is not either. Having security problems or being unusable is. I'd throw in things like serious file collisions and similar serious quality problems as well. I'd even throw in a missing distfile, but only if no user of the software is willing to proxy maintain that aspect of the package. The one thing missing from this discussion is that users CAN proxy-maintain things. Oh, and ANYBODY can run an overlay (it just won't necessarily be listed in layman - but that is how every distro does it). I do think it is a loss for Gentoo if we start removing packages simply because they don't change (which is all a dead upstream means - it isn't always a bad thing). Rich
Please stop useless removals (was: [gentoo-dev] last rites: games-arcade/bitefusion)
# Upstream is dead and gone. # Masked for removal on 20130302 Erm, so this is the _only_ reason - dead upstream? ++ Please, please, stop removing packages for no reason! This happens now way too often: app-dicts/ispell* app-portage/epm app-text/ispell games-arcade/bitefusion games-arcade/xboing games-action/trackballs games-emulation/xmame ... These are just some of the previous examples which I remember because I had to put them in my local overlay. None of these removals alone was so valuable to me that I saw a reason to step up, but the removals for no reasons accumulate previously so much that I see the need to say something: You are destroying the charme of gentoo by systematically removing all these little tools and toys. The availability of a lot of software was once a strength of gentoo, so removing these things is really bad, especially if it happens for no real reason. I was understanding if e.g. someting was removed which needs the gtk-2 or qt-4 framework or something similar and had a dead upstream. But just needing a small tool like imake (xboing) or having open feature requestes (epm) or even nothing and just dead upstream is IMHO really not a reason. If something really does not compile anymore and nobody cares, then remove keywords (or, for god's sake, mask it); if something might theoretically become a security issue (xpdf) then it should be masked. But please do not throw things out of the tree unless really necessary: It does not hurt anybody to have such package in the tree, but removing it - especially if upstream is dead - means that the tarbalös will be removed from the mirrors and thus nobody is able anymore to install it (even if he would care and fix some minor issues) unless he had kept a copy on his local machine (which will mean in the future that he can only do it if he had used gentoo already many years ago and cared during the time of the removal). (If the resources are an argument: I am not speaking about monster packages taking gigabytes of data - these might need to be discussed separately - but mainly about reasonably sized packages which even if summed up do not take much data). Regards Martin
