John Covici wrote:
On Wed, 22 Apr 2020 04:15:18 -0400,
Dale wrote:

[1  <text/plain; UTF-8 (8bit)>]
John Covici wrote:

I am seeing a lot more unmaintained packages -- at least in the ones I
have -- than there used to be and bugs going unanswered probably
because of that.  Not sure what to do about it, I don't have time to
get into doing this much, just keeping up with world updates is quite
time consuming all by itself.



That may be but the packages that are most used are likely maintained
and well maintained at that.  There are some old packages that haven't
been updated in years, upstream is dead or no one uses them much anymore
that are slowly being removed.  If one can't install them, no real point
in them being in the tree.  I might add, the switch from the much older
pythons are really forcing a house cleaning.  But, some packages are
just out of date and something new has taken their place.  Nothing new
there.  I'm sure this happens with every distro out there, even the paid
ones.

I follow -dev and have recently had to uninstall a package and install
something else that is newer and more up to date.  I saw a message about
that old package that seemed to stop working for me a good while ago. 
What I had still lurking about would sometimes crash and I didn't trust
it.  I used to use that as a GUI to manage LVM.  I use LVM a lot here. 
In that message was them removing the old package and recommending a
replacement I never heard of.  I installed it and it may actually be
better than the old software I used to use.  While the old package may
be gone, the new one seems to be more up to date, stable and appears to
have a better design.  Different for sure, I'll have to learn how the
GUI does its thing but could be better in the end. Since LVM has been
updated a good bit in the past year or so, that old software either
needed a lot of work or just use the newer software.

There are a lot of packages that are just not used by enough people to
maintain them anymore.  Some are being replaced with more up to date
packages.  There are lots of reasons for that.  If a package you use is
being removed, search -dev and look to see if there is a replacement
mentioned in the last rites message.  If it was removed, they almost
always include a replacement if there is one.  Sometimes another package
absorbs what the old package used to do. While at times -dev can get
quite busy, I'd be lost without it.  Things are mentioned there about
upcoming changes that I don't see mentioned anywhere else.  That
includes this list as well.  It's a great way to keep somewhat up to
date on what's going on.  One doesn't have to read every post either. 
After a while, you can tell by the subject line if that thread will be
anything you would be interested in.  Last rites, things about upgrades
and such get my attention.  I generally know when something big is going
to happen weeks or even months before it hits the tree.

If you want to share what packages you are missing out on, I'd be glad
to search my -dev archives and see if I can find something that may help. 

Well, teamviewer is the worst -- teamviewer 15 won't emerge because it
will overwrite files belonging to the previous version (!da).  Someone
even slotted the thing, but still no joy.  I filed a bug, but no
response.  Also, although I don't think there is a new version, but
sendmail seens to be unmaintained.
Also, ant-core --  there is a bug against that, but no fix as yet.


I did a search on the forums for teamview but didn't find that problem.  Did you perhaps install it without using portage at some point?  If not, can you try to emerge it and post the failure here, a new thread might be best.  I bet there is someone here who can fix it even if they don't use that package.  Generally, a file collision for one package is handled much like any other package.  It's been a long time and emerge has changed a LOT but the last time I ran into this, I unmerged the package and then re-emerged it.

Sendmail.  I found this:


root@fireball / # cat /var/cache/portage/tree/mail-mta/sendmail/metadata.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd">
<pkgmetadata>
        <!-- maintainer-needed -->
</pkgmetadata>
root@fireball / #


It seems to be maintainer needed at the moment.  Most likely a dev retired or was otherwise unable to maintain it any longer.  I'm not sure who to contact to see if it can be nudged into action tho. You may can talk to a dev, Rich is active on here, and see if he knows or is willing to post on -dev about it needing attention.  Given its widespread use, surely someone who uses it can step up and maintain it. 

Ant-core is maintained by the java team.  I'm not sure what their status is at the moment but since it still exists, I'm sure they are active.  I've seen posts in the past that the java team is a bit slow, lots of work and not enough time in the day.  Might just take a little time.

Dale

:-)  :-)