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

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On 01/12/2010 01:30 PM, Markos Chandras wrote:
> 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.

I agree with the announce part, and the THREAT of masking.  I just don't 
think that the masking should happen at the same time as the announcement.

> 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?

I don't think an open bug constitutes notice.  It is valid notice to the 
maintainer of the package, but not to the larger community.

I probably have 100-200 packages installed, and I'd probably be annoyed 
if any of them went away (I'm still missing kdirstat, but that isn't 
really the kde team's fault).  If an important one was about to go away 
I might step in to maintain it, and I'm sure a lot of other people feel 
the same way.  At the same time, I can't monitor the bugs on 100-200 
packages - that is the reason for having a maintainer.

I think the concern is that some maintainers don't respond in a timely 
manner.  Now, I don't know that maintainers have an obligation to fix 
every bug within a certain timeframe - some packages are problematic and 
I'm not sure that we should discard a 98% solution in favor of a 0% one 
because we don't have a 100% one.  However, serious issues should be in 
scope for treecleaners, but the first goal should be to find a 
maintainer, and only if that fails should we consider masking.

Also - if a maintainer can't be found we might also try to coordinate 
with the Sunrise folks to see if they're willing to take it over.

We should also solicit proxy-maintainers among the user community when 
we announce pending removals.  That could be very helpful with something 
like inn:  I use it VERY lightly and I'm not a news guru, but I am a 
dev.  I bet we have users who are news gurus and who care about inn, but 
they aren't Gentoo devs.  Together we could probably cover the gaps and 
I'm sure devs would be more willing to pick up a package if they knew 
they had some help with the nuances of the package itself.  If that 
falls apart later, at least an active dev is assigned to the package, 
and they can always decide to try to find a new maintainer or kill the 
package (saving treecleaners the work of doing so).

In short - treecleaners should be about getting packages back into the 
mainstream maintenance model, with removal being the fallback option if 
that doesn't work.  They shouldn't have to go out of their way to do 
this, but an advance announcement and some coordination is probably a 
good idea.

Rich