I agree that packages shouldn't be removed or moved because they have no active developer maintaining them - that is going to take the value of portage down quite a lot. Outdated packages do too, but not in quite the same way.
I like the idea of a list or mailing list of developers willing to help update unmaintained packages, and if community submitted ebuilds were encouraged a bit more, the job would be pretty simple. Most of the times i've done version bumps myself have just involved changing the name and fixing up patches. I definitely like the idea of encouraging proxy maintainers, as I said before. Becoming a full developer is (from what i've seen externally) quite difficult and requires a lot of dedicated time, but the user community is much larger - and 100 people doing one ebuild each is going to work better than one person doing 100 ebuilds. As another interesting idea for encouraging proxy maintainence, once an easier/more developed system exists for that (such as the mailing list mentioned before), perhaps a notice should be added to unmaintained ebuilds mentioning that it has no active maintainer, to warn users that a newer version may be available (in which case they can file a bug, etc) and encourage those with the time and skills to take up some of the work on those ebuilds. I would be very willing to work on some ebuilds if it didn't involve chasing a trail of vaguely relevant developers down until one pays attention. :P I would think that masking them due to a lack of maintainence should be used only as a last resort - if a package is blocking other updates or is extremely out of date (unsupported by upstream / everything else). But in those situations, deleting might be a better idea anyway, because what purpose does it really serve? - John Brooks On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Joe Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jeremy Olexa wrote: > > Also, devs willing to maintain > > packages but then later retiring and leaving the packages in limbo. > > Maybe there should be some policy such as, when devs retire if no one > > else steps up to maintain the package, then it automatically gets > > moved to sunrise overlay and only maintained packages stay in the > > portage tree. > > My opinion is that packages should not be removed from the tree just > because > there is no assigned maintainer. Even moving a package to sunrise > effectively > makes it invisible to many users, and a great strength of Gentoo is that it > has such a variety of packages in the tree. > > I do see that there are potential problems with unmaintained packages, so > it > is a good goal to try to solve that. Perhaps developers who have the time > and > choose to make themselves available to do simple version bumps on > unmaintained > packages could put themselves on a mailing list to receive such bug > reports. > Encouraging users to be proxy maintainers is a great idea too (as others > have > suggested). As a last resort, otherwise working packages could be masked > as > "unmaintained", which is probably better than total removal (after all, > they > could still be useful to some users. > > -Joe > >
