[gentoo-dev] Removals reply (I am not going to figure out which tread of those all should i reply to)

[gentoo-dev] Removals reply (I am not going to figure out which tread of those all should i reply to)

[Tomáš Chvátal]

Hello guys,

just to be sure here "Removals are completely up to the maintainer to
decide", with expection of QA removal where the package must be
already broken to get punted.

If you as developers and users find some package useful you can retake
the maintainership (or became proxy-maint) which also expects you to
take care of the bugs (QA can prune it even if you take the
maintainership but ignore failures [even if your personal feeling is
that it is corner case, it is for QA to deicde]).

For dead upstream packages there are quite few problems you, who
support keeping it in tree, seem not to notice. The distro patches
will blob up (with each distro having different stuff) as things break
with shiny new updates (and no saying it builds with older xyz does
not make it work),  users have no chance to report problems with the
package elsewhere than to our bugzilla, etc, etc. This is the reason
why the fedorahosted.org was fired up. So if you care about the
package, take your time, fire up VCS/homepage/tracker there and try to
work on it or find someone else interested to help you with becaming
at least pseodo-upstream.

Cheers

Tom

Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply (I am not going to figure out which tread of those all should i reply to)

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 8:53 AM, Tomáš Chvátal <tomas.chvatal@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you as developers and users find some package useful you can retake
> the maintainership (or became proxy-maint) which also expects you to
> take care of the bugs (QA can prune it even if you take the
> maintainership but ignore failures [even if your personal feeling is
> that it is corner case, it is for QA to deicde]).

Citation?  I don't see any GLEPs or other Council-approved policies to
that effect.

And this is of course why nobody actually wants to maintain these
packages - everybody is going to be looking over your shoulder because
they've already decided that the existence of the package bothers
them.

Honestly, threads like this bug me so much that I'm half-tempted to
take over maintainership of one of these packages just to be a test
case...  Ugh - time for an email break...

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply (I am not going to figure out which tread of those all should i reply to)

[Tomáš Chvátal]

2013/2/1 Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>:
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 8:53 AM, Tomáš Chvátal <tomas.chvatal@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you as developers and users find some package useful you can retake
>> the maintainership (or became proxy-maint) which also expects you to
>> take care of the bugs (QA can prune it even if you take the
>> maintainership but ignore failures [even if your personal feeling is
>> that it is corner case, it is for QA to deicde]).
>
> Citation?  I don't see any GLEPs or other Council-approved policies to
> that effect.

You my friend are slowly pissing me of as I read through all the
flames you cause on -dev.
There is no council vote required as it is already defined within qa
team specs (and glep too when i think of it, so yep there is glep for
you).

>
> And this is of course why nobody actually wants to maintain these
> packages - everybody is going to be looking over your shoulder because
> they've already decided that the existence of the package bothers
> them.

No, they won't get anyone looking over their shoulder unless they
decide to neglect the bugs as few maintainers did.
I didn't see a lot forced removals caused by qa, did you?

The existence of the package usually does not bother anyone,
maintainer just decided that its burden so it will be removed, he
could've put it to m-n but its up to every maintainer to decide what
to do if the package has bugs he deem serious. If anyone else decide
to pick up where they left, it is his job to ensure the package gets
fixed and up-par to work nicely.

Bit ago we had this discussion about keeping broken shit in tree
masked or just prune it, and obvious solution was to remove it as
there is just few of us and if anyone wants to start where we left he
can pick out the ebuild from attic and put into his own overlay where
it might work for him or even put it back to tree fixed.

>
> Honestly, threads like this bug me so much that I'm half-tempted to
> take over maintainership of one of these packages just to be a test
> case...  Ugh - time for an email break...
>
Go for it, i wrote exactly what to do, create vcs/tracker/homepage and
it can stay.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply (I am not going to figure out which tread of those all should i reply to)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 01/02/2013 18:00, Tomáš Chvátal wrote:
> No, they won't get anyone looking over their shoulder unless they
> decide to neglect the bugs as few maintainers did.
> I didn't see a lot forced removals caused by qa, did you?

As far as I can tell, they come down to two:

 - webmin; which was saved after a masking and ended up not going
anywhere, as most of the bugs (most security-related due to the nature
of webmin!) were still around months after the unmask;

 - ${forgothename} which Robbins claimed he fixed in five minutes and
our QA was bad — where his fix was exchanging a build-time failure with
a runtime abort, and thus was kicked just as fine;

You could possibly add the damn squeezebox software that even Logitech
discontinued, but for that I'd just refer to the previous flame which
for my side boiled down "if you want to keep it around, mask the fucker
because it's crap".

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply - please write adequate log messages!

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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Am Freitag, 1. Februar 2013, 14:53:19 schrieb Tomáš Chvátal:
> just to be sure here "Removals are completely up to the maintainer to
> decide", with expection of QA removal where the package must be
> already broken to get punted.
> 
> If you as developers and users find some package useful you can retake
> the maintainership (or became proxy-maint) which also expects you to
> take care of the bugs (QA can prune it even if you take the
> maintainership but ignore failures [even if your personal feeling is
> that it is corner case, it is for QA to deicde]).

I agree 100% that we should not accumulate cruft in the tree and that removals 
are necessary. Please however, 

*** write meaningful log or mask messages *** !!!

"Old and uses IMake" is not really a reason for treecleaning. "Fortify crash 
on start and unuseable on fast machines" definitely is.

Cheers, A

-- 

Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer 
dilfridge@gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/


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