Re: [gentoo-dev] Cleaning tree of outdated packages

[Ian Stakenvicius <axs@gentoo.org>]

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On 13/12/12 06:24 PM, Jeff Horelick wrote:
> On 13 December 2012 17:57, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Jory A. Pratt
>> <anarchy@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> 
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>>> On 12/13/2012 12:48 PM, Tomáš Chvátal wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> But there is one big ass but. We have some packages that
>>>> were stabilised last time few year back and they provide
>>>> multiple testing versions on top of that. Who is the one to
>>>> deterimine which one should go stable and which to
>>> get rid of?
>>>> We had some humble tryouts to create automatic stabilisation
>>>> request which didn't turn out exactly well as most of the
>>>> maintainers had to actually do more work ;-)
>>> It is always up to the maintainer/herd as to when a package
>>> goes stable. But to keep ebuilds for ex. gcc around for over 5
>>> years is just insane. Keep packages around that have been
>>> replaced with a newer package is just insane. Yes the newer
>>> package has to move to stable first, but we should be cleaning
>>> the tree up to only support what we really and truly are gonna
>>> support. Do we really want to try and use gcc-2.95 to build 
>>> kernel-3.7? I highly doubt it would even work.
>> 
>> I am sure that some people find it very handy to have old gcc
>> ebuilds around. It might come in handy for testing.
>> 
>> It doesn't matter if they can't compile the latest kernel. If
>> someone files a bug for that, it gets closed as invalid; no big
>> deal.
>> 
>> So long as the maintainers keep them working, I see no problem
>> with old ebuilds in the tree.
>> 
> 
> I tend to agree with this sentiment.
> 
> I keep several old audacious (for example) ebuilds around because
> the current audacious upstream broke a useful feature in newer
> releases and refuses to fix it, hence why i feel the need to keep
> audacious 2.x ebuilds around. I'm going to also keep both audacious
> 3.2.x and
>> =3.3.x around since >=3.3 is GTK3-only and (like me) there ma be
>> some
> GTK3 haters out there who want to stay away from it.
> 
> There are good reasons for keeping old ebuilds in the tree. It may 
> seem crufty if you're just looking at the tree, but they'll be a 
> blessing when you truly need them. Part of why I love being a
> Gentoo users is that if something's broken in a release, I can
> almost always install either an older or newer version and have my
> problems fixed in 5 minutes.
> 

+1 , the ability to install older versions of software or legacy
software is one of the reasons I switched to Gentoo in the first
place.  There is of course a point when these packages can no longer
be maintained, but until that happens there isn't any reason to me
that they should be removed.

When users follow standard installation methods, then by default they
will always have the latest stable (or latest ~arch) packages anyhow;
I don't see the older packages causing that many issues with our users
in the tree.

Of course if there isn't any need in keeping the old ebuilds around,
then yes they should probably be dropped within a short time of
another one going stable.  Users can always draw the old ebuilds out
of the attic*

*it would be nice, though, if the patchsets that inevitably disappear
from the distfiles mirrors could somehow be kept, though.  Not
necessarily on distfiles, but maybe in the maintainer's dev webspace?
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