Am 2018-09-24 21:36, schrieb Bruce Dubbs via blfs-dev:
Over the years, BLFS has grown a lot. There are over 1000 individual
tarballs listed in the book. This creates a large maintenance burden.
It is a rare week when we have less than 30 new packages that need to
be updated.
The most time intensive process is preparing for our semi-annual
release. This is a two week process that provides quality control to
ensure all packages build with current libraries and support programs.
If packages are not kept up to date at other times, the time for the
release process will grow significantly. In addition, during the time
of release processing, new packages continue to be released.
To try to alleviate this problem, I am proposing that we remove some
packages from LFS. The list below is my initial proposal of packages
that are less frequently needed by users and are not worth maintaining
by BLFS. These packages are user level programs and do not include
libraries. Removal of libraries that are only used by these packages
will follow.
If I do not hear of any objections, I intend to start removing these
packages around October 1st.
I'm also open to nominations for removal of other packages.
-- Bruce
btrfs-progs-4.17.1
jfsutils-1.1.15
ntfs-3g-2017.3.23
reiserfsprogs-3.6.27
xfsprogs-4.18.0
JOE-4.6
Kate-18.08.0
Mousepad-0.4.1
zsh-5.6
Compface-1.5.2
MC-4.8.21
Sysstat-11.6.5
GCC-Ada-8.2.0
Guile-2.2.4
Apache-Maven-3.5.4
NcFTP-3.2.6
Lynx-2.8.9rel.1 or W3m-0.5.3
Alpine-2.21
ProFTPD-1.3.6
sendmail-8.15.2
OpenLDAP-2.4.46
IceWM-1.4.2
AbiWord-3.0.2
Gnumeric-1.12.43
Balsa-2.5.6
feh-2.27.1
FontForge-20170731
Pidgin-2.13.0
Transmission-2.94
xarchiver-0.5.4
Transcode-1.1.7
Audacious-3.10
Enscript-1.6.6
MuPDF-1.13.0
paps-0.6.8
I see your point of trying to get maintenance of BLFS a bit easier. To
be honest, I do not fully agree that this could be achieved by
aggressively removing some packages. Beside the fact that for nearly
every package which is in the book a reason had exist to add it, you'll
find for nearly every package someone who would prefer to keep it. Just
remove packages is somewhat "disappointing" to those who use those
packages - mostly because of personal preferences.
I think the BLFS-Basic book is a good chance to ease our live. This is
the book we "guarantee" that the components are compiling/working
properly on the new LFS basis. This is what we should do at the
semi-annual releases. The number of packages in the BLFS-Basis is small
enough to get it done.
The big BLFS book could be seen as a collection of instructions the LFS
community provides but the versions in there might be outdated or even
do not work on current LFS. I'd suggest to note this fact in big letters
to the big-book. If something does not work, we might get a
report/ticket for that and this can be used as a sign that this package
is in use by users. When maintaining the big-book that way, over the
time we will see a set of packages which are not touched for a while.
That might have the reason that there are simply no upgrades required
and the package smoothly works or the other way round, because of nobody
cares about them but what ever the reason might be, we will see it.
I'd prefer to produce a list of removal-candidates this way and not by
selecting randomly some packages which might (not) be in use here or
there.
In the list above, I'd like to see btrfs, mousepad, Ada, lynx, OpenLdap,
xarchive, audacious to be kept - just personal taste.
--
Thomas
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