Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Last rites: media-gfx/gmic

[Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93@gmail.com>]

On 10/25/23 9:29 PM, Jonas Stein wrote:
> Hi Marecki,
> 
> this is a very powerful package with many users.
> Thank you for maintaining it till now.
> 
> Could you address the exact problems to upstream, so they are aware and
> can improve it?
> I think not only Gentoo, but also other distributions suffer if it does
> not build smooth.
> 
> Looks to me as if the package is not broken now, but there is a lack of
> manpower to update it. 30 days is the minimum for a removal.
> 
> I suggest to keep it for a few more months.


It's difficult to tell whether the problems were reported upstream since
upstream has deleted the repository and purged all issues, PRs, commits,
tags, and anything else whatsoever back in April.

The commit message is elucidative: "Clean repository".

Per https://github.com/GreycLab/gmic/issues/1#issuecomment-1521421747

"""
Yes, my fault. I've completely messed up (mainly because I'm still a git
novice after all these years!). I had to delete/recreate the repository
from scratch.
"""

This is of course either untrue or every kind of over-reaction, and
users have commented there to the effect of being willing to help sort
things out but there has been radio silence. It is long past the 90 days
where outright github-level recovery is possible.

I think this also offers some compelling arguments against maintainers
being willing to  deal with the challenges of this software -- this is a
pretty steep social cost to investing time and effort into caring about,
using, or maintaining such software.

I suppose it's always possible to orphan the package and let it rot
until it gets last-rited for not working. Marecki -- is there any
specific concern that it's likely to rot quickly if it lacks a maintainer?


-- 
Eli Schwartz