On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:35:15AM -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:44 PM, NP-Hardass <NP-Hardass@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
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> > With all of the unclaimed herds and unclaimed packages within them, I
> > started to wonder what will happen after the GLEP 67 transition
> > finally comes to fruition.  This left me with some concerns and I was
> > wondering what the community thinks about them, and some possible
> > solutions.
> >
> > There is a large number of packages from unclaimed herds that, at this
> > time, look like they will not be claimed by developers.  This will
> > likely result in a huge increase in maintainer-needed packages (and
> > subsequent package rot).  This isn't to say that some of these
> > packages weren't previously in a "maintainer-needed" like state, but
> > now, they will explicitly be there.
> >
> 
> Speaking as the dude who founded the treecleaners project...all things die.
> Even software. While some may yearn for a software archive (nee,
> graveyard!), I put forth that the gentoo-x86 tree is not such a thing. Do
> not weep for the unmaintained packages that will be cleaned![1]

I couldn't have said this better myself. The gentoo-x86 tree is not a
software archival service. If packages are unmaintained, that is what
the treecleaners project is for is to boot those packages out of the
tree.

I would like to see a possible timelimit set on how long packages can
stay in maintainer-needed; once a package goes there, if we can't find
someone to maintain it, we should consider booting it after that time
limit passes.

If someone wants to run the graveyard overlay and keep those old
packages around more power to them, but they definitely do not
belong in the main tree if they are unmaintained for an extended period
of time.

William