[gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Aniruddha]

Hi,

Borg hasn't  been updated in portage for a while despite the fact that
new versions were released over a year ago (see
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184699 ). Therefor I suggest
app-office/borg gets removed from portage.

Regards,

Aniruddha

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Aniruddha]

On Sat, 2008-08-16 at 19:30 +0100, Robert Bridge wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:17:10 +0200
> Aniruddha <mailing_list@orange.nl> wrote:
> 
> > Borg hasn't  been updated in portage for a while despite the fact that
> > new versions were released over a year ago (see
> > http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184699 ). Therefor I suggest
> > app-office/borg gets removed from portage.
> 
> Why not put together an ebuild for a recent version? 
> 
> If there are no major changes, an ebuild will probably get it updated
> quickly enough, in my experience.
> 
> Rob.


I've filed the bugreport (version bump) a year ago. It looks like borg
has no maintainer.

Regards,

Aniruddha

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[John Brooks]

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It can be somewhat difficult to find someone to look over and commit an
ebuild on an unmaintained package though - the several times i've done that
have involved tracking down developers with previous commits to the package
or who are active in the category and trying to find one who isn't retired
(I have good taste in packages, apparently - high turnover :P). On one, I
had to talk to 7 different developers before I found someone willing and
able to help. Just adding to the bug probably won't help unless it's
assigned to someone - take a look at it's changelog
(/usr/portage/category/package/Changelog) and try to get in touch with
specific people if nobody responds to the tracker.

Random idea: How about a different bug assignee for maintainer-needed
packages with provided ebuilds/patches? Either something generic, or try to
go for something more category/package specific (herds, etc). Lots of work
for bugwranglers, though. There is a huge difference to developers between
an unmaintained package with no progress and just looking over an ebuild
that has been used successfully by several people.

- John Brooks

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Robert Bridge <robert@robbieab.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:42:35 +0200
> Aniruddha <mailing_list@orange.nl> wrote:
>
> > I've filed the bugreport (version bump) a year ago. It looks like borg
> > has no maintainer.
>
> So maintain it. You don't need to be a dev to write an ebuild, and
> there are enough devs who are happy to throw an eye over user donated
> ebuilds and commit them to the tree...
>
> Removing a package from portage simply because no one has commited the
> up-to-date version you want is silly. If the only problem is
> no version bumping, provide the ebuild. Someone will commit it. I've
> done that for a few packages, it's not hard.
>
> I don't know anything about borg specifically, but as a user, I would
> not want to see packages being removed from portage just because the
> devs are too busy to write version bump ebuilds.
>
> Rob.
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Robert Bridge]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:17:10 +0200
Aniruddha <mailing_list@orange.nl> wrote:

> Borg hasn't  been updated in portage for a while despite the fact that
> new versions were released over a year ago (see
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184699 ). Therefor I suggest
> app-office/borg gets removed from portage.

Why not put together an ebuild for a recent version? 

If there are no major changes, an ebuild will probably get it updated
quickly enough, in my experience.

Rob.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Arun Raghavan]

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Robert Bridge wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:42:35 +0200
> Aniruddha <mailing_list@orange.nl> wrote:
> 
>> I've filed the bugreport (version bump) a year ago. It looks like borg
>> has no maintainer.
> 
> So maintain it. You don't need to be a dev to write an ebuild, and
> there are enough devs who are happy to throw an eye over user donated
> ebuilds and commit them to the tree...

And then there's the sunrise overlay [1].

Cheers,
Arun

[1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Robert Bridge]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:42:35 +0200
Aniruddha <mailing_list@orange.nl> wrote:

> I've filed the bugreport (version bump) a year ago. It looks like borg
> has no maintainer.

So maintain it. You don't need to be a dev to write an ebuild, and
there are enough devs who are happy to throw an eye over user donated
ebuilds and commit them to the tree...

Removing a package from portage simply because no one has commited the
up-to-date version you want is silly. If the only problem is
no version bumping, provide the ebuild. Someone will commit it. I've
done that for a few packages, it's not hard. 

I don't know anything about borg specifically, but as a user, I would
not want to see packages being removed from portage just because the
devs are too busy to write version bump ebuilds.

Rob.

[gentoo-dev] Re: Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Duncan]

Arun Raghavan <ford_prefect@gentoo.org> posted
48A71F65.1080908@gentoo.org, excerpted below, on  Sun, 17 Aug 2008
00:11:41 +0530:

> And then there's the sunrise overlay [1].

Yes, but sunrise doesn't (didn't?) take any packages already in the 
tree.  If it's not getting updated in-tree, however, and the only block 
from it being in sunrise is that it's in-tree already (that is, there's 
someone already actively willing to work with it in sunrise, and only 
can't because it's in-tree), then that could be support for removing it 
from the tree.

But better than that would be finding a dev to proxy-maintain it in the 
tree, since the above assumes a user already willing to do the real 
work.  The difference is in-tree with a named proxy-maintainer, or in-
sunrise with the sunrise devs acting as proxies.  Since in-tree is higher 
visibility and availability, that's definitely preferred, and if it's 
already in-tree, the only blocker is then finding someone to be that 
named proxy-maintainer.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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John Brooks wrote:
> Random idea: How about a different bug assignee for maintainer-needed
> packages with provided ebuilds/patches? Either something generic, or
> try to go for something more category/package specific (herds, etc).
> Lots of work for bugwranglers, though. There is a huge difference to
> developers between an unmaintained package with no progress and just
> looking over an ebuild that has been used successfully by several
> people.

No need for an additional mail/bugzie alias here, we could simply use a
KEYWORD like the existing 'Inclusion' (which isn't used that much for
now, 63 open bugs have that keyword) or a new 'HasPatch' as a
counterpart for 'NeedPatch'.

  Tobias

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Jeremy Olexa]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
> John Brooks wrote:
>> Random idea: How about a different bug assignee for maintainer-needed
>> packages with provided ebuilds/patches? Either something generic, or
>> try to go for something more category/package specific (herds, etc).
>> Lots of work for bugwranglers, though. There is a huge difference to
>> developers between an unmaintained package with no progress and just
>> looking over an ebuild that has been used successfully by several
>> people.
>
> No need for an additional mail/bugzie alias here, we could simply use a
> KEYWORD like the existing 'Inclusion' (which isn't used that much for
> now, 63 open bugs have that keyword) or a new 'HasPatch' as a
> counterpart for 'NeedPatch'.

(This email isn't targeted towards Tobias - just replying)

What is wrong with the KEYWORD called 'EBUILD' defined as: "Marks an
issue to be a user submitted ebuild." ? You can easily make a search
that is assigned to maintainer-needed and has the EBUILD keyword (or
any keyword).[1]

I feel like you guys are trying to solve issues related to an
underlying problem but not actually targeting the problem itself. The
main issue is a lack of man-power. Also, devs willing to maintain
packages but then later retiring and leaving the packages in limbo.
Maybe there should be some policy such as, when devs retire if no one
else steps up to maintain the package, then it automatically gets
moved to sunrise overlay and only maintained packages stay in the
portage tree. This would cut down on our current 247 maintainer-needed
bugs[2] or our 35 bugs assigned to maintainer-needed with 'bump' in
the summary[3]. However, keep in mind that we do have 497 bugs
assigned to anyone with 'bump' in the summary[4].

Just some thoughts to ponder,
Jeremy

[1]: http://tinyurl.com/6y653y
[2]: http://tinyurl.com/6olohq
[3]: http://tinyurl.com/5d3tfl
[4]: http://tinyurl.com/689y5p

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[Joe Peterson]

Jeremy Olexa wrote:
> Also, devs willing to maintain
> packages but then later retiring and leaving the packages in limbo.
> Maybe there should be some policy such as, when devs retire if no one
> else steps up to maintain the package, then it automatically gets
> moved to sunrise overlay and only maintained packages stay in the
> portage tree.

My opinion is that packages should not be removed from the tree just because
there is no assigned maintainer.  Even moving a package to sunrise effectively
makes it invisible to many users, and a great strength of Gentoo is that it
has such a variety of packages in the tree.

I do see that there are potential problems with unmaintained packages, so it
is a good goal to try to solve that.  Perhaps developers who have the time and
choose to make themselves available to do simple version bumps on unmaintained
packages could put themselves on a mailing list to receive such bug reports.
Encouraging users to be proxy maintainers is a great idea too (as others have
suggested).  As a last resort, otherwise working packages could be masked as
"unmaintained", which is probably better than total removal (after all, they
could still be useful to some users.

						-Joe

Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: remove app-office/borg from portage.

[John Brooks]

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I agree that packages shouldn't be removed or moved because they have no
active developer maintaining them - that is going to take the value of
portage down quite a lot. Outdated packages do too, but not in quite the
same way.

I like the idea of a list or mailing list of developers willing to help
update unmaintained packages, and if community submitted ebuilds were
encouraged a bit more, the job would be pretty simple. Most of the times
i've done version bumps myself have just involved changing the name and
fixing up patches. I definitely like the idea of encouraging proxy
maintainers, as I said before. Becoming a full developer is (from what i've
seen externally) quite difficult and requires a lot of dedicated time, but
the user community is much larger - and 100 people doing one ebuild each is
going to work better than one person doing 100 ebuilds.

As another interesting idea for encouraging proxy maintainence, once an
easier/more developed system exists for that (such as the mailing list
mentioned before), perhaps a notice should be added to unmaintained ebuilds
mentioning that it has no active maintainer, to warn users that a newer
version may be available (in which case they can file a bug, etc) and
encourage those with the time and skills to take up some of the work on
those ebuilds. I would be very willing to work on some ebuilds if it didn't
involve chasing a trail of vaguely relevant developers down until one pays
attention. :P

I would think that masking them due to a lack of maintainence should be used
only as a last resort - if a package is blocking other updates or is
extremely out of date (unsupported by upstream / everything else). But in
those situations, deleting might be a better idea anyway, because what
purpose does it really serve?

- John Brooks

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Joe Peterson <lavajoe@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Jeremy Olexa wrote:
> > Also, devs willing to maintain
> > packages but then later retiring and leaving the packages in limbo.
> > Maybe there should be some policy such as, when devs retire if no one
> > else steps up to maintain the package, then it automatically gets
> > moved to sunrise overlay and only maintained packages stay in the
> > portage tree.
>
> My opinion is that packages should not be removed from the tree just
> because
> there is no assigned maintainer.  Even moving a package to sunrise
> effectively
> makes it invisible to many users, and a great strength of Gentoo is that it
> has such a variety of packages in the tree.
>
> I do see that there are potential problems with unmaintained packages, so
> it
> is a good goal to try to solve that.  Perhaps developers who have the time
> and
> choose to make themselves available to do simple version bumps on
> unmaintained
> packages could put themselves on a mailing list to receive such bug
> reports.
> Encouraging users to be proxy maintainers is a great idea too (as others
> have
> suggested).  As a last resort, otherwise working packages could be masked
> as
> "unmaintained", which is probably better than total removal (after all,
> they
> could still be useful to some users.
>
>                                                -Joe
>
>

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