On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbh...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Alec Warner <anta...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbh...@gentoo.org> >> wrote: >>> Just start removing old[1] maintainer-needed packages. If people >>> complain, tell them to start maintaining it. If they continue to >>> complain, ignore them. As tree-cleaner, you have the power to do this >>> and not take bullshit from people about it. >> >> The intent of the TreeCleaner project (years ago) was to essentially >> look for packages in bugzilla that had lots of bugs and no maintainer. >> For a while beandog essentially maintained a site that tracked this >> for us (Gentoo Package that need Lovin' was the awesome title.) >> >> From that list you either fixed the problems and commited them (e.g. >> you were a roving package maintainer) or you pmasked it and marked it >> for the deadpool. >> >> There is not much policy on treecleaning a package just because no one >> has touched it. Time since last touch was just one of a dozen >> indicators used to find packages that are broken (because a package >> not touched since 2006 is also not likely to compile.) >> > > Sure, that's the history. But what made sense back then doesn't make > sense now. Back then we didn't have 600+ packages that no one > maintains, and whose bugs go almost entirely unread. We had crazy > amounts of manpower back then.
We probably had more than 600 unmaintained packages because no one was removing dead packages from the tree. I also dispute your manpower logic. Gentoo has been short on developers for years. I don't see how 2011 is any different than 2007 in this aspect. > > As we evolve, the responsibilities of the different parts of Gentoo > also evolve. As such, the tree-cleaners project has evolved, and if > the team isn't allowed to clean the tree, then why do we even have it > anymore? The community got pissed when I deleted unmaintained packages from the tree 'just because it was unmaintained.' Thats why there were a set of criteria for removal. Maybe they changed their mind and you can convince them. Ignoring people's opinions because they are whiners and you are Treecleaners is a thin edge to walk though; so I'd be careful. At least during my tenure there were still hundreds of unmaintained and broken packages; so I didn't much care about unmaintained but working stuff (since there was plenty of work to do.) I would argue the tree is still in a similar state. > > I really don't understand *why* people want to keep around > unmaintained packages. If a package is not maintained, we should come > up and say it outright. Trying to maintain the illusion of maintenance > is really bad — for each person reporting a bug about a package, 100 > people who got that same bug don't report it at all. So what happens > when there are just 50 users for some packages? Half the time we won't > even know that one of them is broken[1]. The rest of the time, users > will get a bad impression of Gentoo saying "Man, half the packages > don't even work". Properly tagged I don't think there is any illusion. Maintainer-needed is maintainer-needed after all. If half of the packages *in the tree* don't work then we have a problem. If half the packages *a user tries to install* are broken then they should certainly use another distro. Perhaps Gentoo is not for their area (and the key point is that it doesn't have to be.) > > It's really simple: > > (a) If the package has plenty of users, there should be no problems > finding a maintainer or a proxy-maintainer. > (b) If the package has few users and is high-maintenance, it's either > already broken, or will get broken soon without a maintainer. Find one > or remove it! > (c) If the package has few users and is low-maintenance, package.mask > it so we can figure out who the users are, and we can get them to > proxy-maintain it, it's so little work anyway, right? > (d) If the package has very few or no users, what the hell is it doing > unmaintained in the tree? It's just eating up disk inodes and space. So launch gstats and get usage numbers. If no one is using a package that is a keen indicator it can be punted; however no one will get off their ass and get more data to back anything up (myself included...) All of your points above assume we have a decent metric of 'how many users a package has' and about the only way we know that is when users file bugs for it (version bump, bug, feature req, etc..) > > We all like to boast about how gentoo has 15,000 packages, but we > neglect to mention that more than 1000 of these are either > unmaintained or very poorly maintained. And this is a very > conservative number. But again this is all made up...m-n was 670-odd packages last I checked. Do we still have m-w these days? > > Let's not turn portage into a graveyard for packages. Let's just remove crap. > > 1. Writer is bad at statistics, this is probably inaccurate. > > -- > ~Nirbheek Chauhan > > Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team > >
