Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Last rites: net-nntp/inn

[Jeroen Roovers <jer@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:32:06 +0200
Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Thanks for saving this package. As Jeremy said, there is absolutely
> no way to measure the popularity of a package. So if it has no
> maintainer, and open bugs we have to mask it and announce it here. It
> is up to you whether you want to save it or not

I don't think the (perceived) popularity of the package has anything to
do with it.

I do think maybe treecleaner@ needs to set up policies with regard to
methods of investigation, thoroughness, and transparency. In the case
at hand, treecleaner shouldn't have been called in (you're not the
bloody cavalry you know! ;-) in the first place, and should certainly
not have acted (so quickly).

It's not clear to me generally what you (treecleaner@) all do and why
you do it - but it *is* clear that it's very easy to `rm -r *' to get
rid of some old stuff and that you may end up regretting it later.

Particularly, it looks like the net-mail, net-news and netmon herds are
understaffed and have been for a while, and I see a general shift of
developers towards desktop oriented packages and away from the nuts and
bolts that make it all go.

I think (but have no facts apart from talking to people and handling
network package related bugs in every way possible) that our userbase
is still much more technically oriented. If that's all true, then doing
some `rm net-*/*' cleanups may well end up hurting Gentoo as you would
drive out more of the networking oriented people (users and developers)
that I feel we still need to support, and turn into Yet Another Desktop
Oriented Distro (which we also need, but that's already covered quite
well).

ISTR treecleaner@ already had some policy in place that requires some
$period to pass before you mask for removal. Maybe you should announce
an upcoming mask nice and early to keep that shock wave from reaching
users straight away.


Regards,
     jer