On Tuesday 12 January 2010 20:21:59 Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> 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).
So what do you suggest? Have old, unmaintained and broken ( or forgotten ) 
packages under those categories in order to preserve the "personality" of 
Gentoo? IMHO ( this is not a treecleaners@ opinion, i m just talking for my 
self ), announcing and masking a package is a good way to inform and wake up 
everybody to take care of this package if they really really want to stay on 
portage. Having broken and unmaintained packages on tree, just to say that we 
have plenty of packages on portage is not acceptable policy imho. So if you 
want a package, plz take care of it :)
> 
> 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.
Having open bugs for months isn't a way to let everybody know that this 
package is broken for long time, so it is a valid candidate for removal? 
Should we send that via e-mail as well? 
> 
> 
> Regards,
>      jer
> 

-- 
Markos Chandras (hwoarang)
Gentoo Linux Developer
Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org