On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 18:38 -0600, Ryan Hill wrote: <snip>
> The maintainer MUST NOT NEVER EVER NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT remove the > latest stable ebuild of an arch without the approval of the arch team or > he/she will be fed to the Galrog. As long as the maintainer can pass off the maintenance of the (sometimes dozens) of ancient ebuilds that need to be kept around for that one arch to the arch team, and re-assign any resulting bugs to them, fine. Or, alternatively, unilaterally decide to drop all keywords for the arch in question. Yes, that was extreme, but no more than the previous quoted statement. There needs to be give and take here. Yes, it's really bad to remove the last stable ebuild for an arch. However, its *also* bad to have to maintain years old versions of lots of ebuilds. And yes, it will be a lot, since most packages don't exist in a vacuum, and require older deps (which possibly will be maintained by other maintainers than the first package, causing a cascade of old packages in the tree). All this will do in practice is cause maintainers to ignore bugs for those old packages for those few arches, since the maintainer won't have that version installed. In fact, in my experience, they frequently *can't* have that version installed, since it requires older versions of other packages that need to be upgraded to maintain newer versions of the same package. How much bit rot do we want in the tree? Daniel (who is both an arch team member and gnome team lead)
