Re: [gentoo-dev] last rites: sys-fs/eudev

[Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>]

"Eddie Chapman" <eddie@ehuk.net> writes:

> martin-kokos wrote:
>> ------- Original Message -------
>> On Tuesday, September 12th, 2023 at 3:36 PM, Eddie Chapman
>> <eddie@ehuk.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Sam James wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Eddie Chapman" eddie@ehuk.net writes:
>>>>
>>>>>>> So what's the situation with the current Gentoo maintainers?
>>>>>>> Have
>>>>>>> they disappeared? I often see on here packages being offered up
>>>>>>> for grabs. Why hasn't there been a call to give others the
>>>>>>> opportunity to volunteer as maintainers rather than going
>>>>>>> straight to last riting the package? Or
>>>>>>> has that happened and I've missed it, in which case I apologise.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There was a year ago or so and nothing really came out of it. But
>>>>>> see above wrt 'tags'.
>>>>>
>>>>> A year is a long time, there might well now be people willing to
>>>>> take over maintaining it that were not willing to 1 year ago, if
>>>>> that is what is required.
>>>>
>>>> They have a month to step up anyway, although that will involve
>>>> upstream activity too.
>>>
>>> I see there was already a change in the tree yesterday that assumes
>>> sys-fs/eudev is going (commit d46677fd864b30315423c8364ca44db2de98e2a1,
>>> sys-fs/mdadm/mdadm-4.2-r2, amd64 stable keyworded). Has this actually
>>> been decided behind the scenes already? This starts to smell a little
>>> ugly unless I've completely misunderstood something. I hope I'm wrong.
>>>
>>> One thing I don't understand: the Gentoo project page for eudev lists 4
>>>  members including the lead, and FWICT they are mostly still active in
>>> other areas of Gentoo (recent commits to the tree in other packages).
>>> The
>>> project lead is also an original author of eudev. I find it hard to
>>> believe that all 4 of these people have completely lost interest in
>>> eudev in Gentoo. Have any of these 4 maintainers publicly said
>>> (anywhere) that
>>> they are not interested in being maintainers anymore (which is fine if
>>> that is the case)? We're not talking here about a lone maintainer of
>>> some peripheral package that's disappeared leaving an orphaned package.
>>>
>>> I'm an outsider to Gentoo development (just a heavy user for over a
>>> decade both personally and professionally) so I might have missed
>>> something. I just find it puzzling.
>>
>> I don't understand why there is need to go off of *hints and clues*
>> whether its active development or whether the project maintainers want to
>> maintain it or not. The project lead has explained the original reason for
>> eudev being part of base and why that reason has passed. Issue decided 2
>> years ago.
>>
>> https://www.gentoo.org/support/news-items/2021-08-24-eudev-retirement.htm
>> l
>>
>> If there were maintainers to suport it for 2 extra years, that's very
>> nice of them. Speculating, without them, after their decision to
>> last-rite and asking to support eudev indefinitely, without giving any
>> insightful reason as to why, seems ... not a great way to motivate
>> someone to do something extra for me.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>
> Thank you Martin and Sam for pointing out to me the news item above from 2
> years ago, which for some reason I missed originally, so I wasn't aware
> this is how the people listed as current maintainers felt.
>
> This seems like a crucial piece of information that was sadly omitted from
> the original last rite message.
>
> Maybe there is a lesson here somewhere about communication and last riting
> of core system packages.

I've just pushed
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=6d1669686c56dc7f05750d9b36db1c2f9001275a
which I think should help.

That's a fair point, thank you. It's also easy to forget that people
might have missed an item etc.