On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 06:24:30PM -0500, Jeff Horelick wrote: > On 13 December 2012 17:57, Mike Gilbert <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Jory A. Pratt <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >> Hash: SHA1 > >> > >> On 12/13/2012 12:48 PM, Tomáš Chvátal wrote: > >>> > >>> But there is one big ass but. We have some packages that were > >>> stabilised last time few year back and they provide multiple testing > >>> versions on top of that. > >>> Who is the one to deterimine which one should go stable and which to > >> get rid of? > >>> We had some humble tryouts to create automatic stabilisation request > >>> which didn't turn out exactly well as most of the maintainers had to > >>> actually do more work ;-) > >> It is always up to the maintainer/herd as to when a package goes stable. > >> But to keep ebuilds for ex. gcc around for over 5 years is just insane. > >> Keep packages around that have been replaced with a newer package is > >> just insane. Yes the newer package has to move to stable first, but we > >> should be cleaning the tree up to only support what we really and truly > >> are gonna support. Do we really want to try and use gcc-2.95 to build > >> kernel-3.7? I highly doubt it would even work. > > > > I am sure that some people find it very handy to have old gcc ebuilds > > around. It might come in handy for testing. > > > > It doesn't matter if they can't compile the latest kernel. If someone > > files a bug for that, it gets closed as invalid; no big deal. > > > > So long as the maintainers keep them working, I see no problem with > > old ebuilds in the tree. > > > > I tend to agree with this sentiment. > > I keep several old audacious (for example) ebuilds around because the > current audacious upstream broke a useful feature in newer releases > and refuses to fix it, hence why i feel the need to keep audacious 2.x > ebuilds around. I'm going to also keep both audacious 3.2.x and > >=3.3.x around since >=3.3 is GTK3-only and (like me) there ma be some > GTK3 haters out there who want to stay away from it. > > There are good reasons for keeping old ebuilds in the tree. It may > seem crufty if you're just looking at the tree, but they'll be a > blessing when you truly need them. Part of why I love being a Gentoo > users is that if something's broken in a release, I can almost always > install either an older or newer version and have my problems fixed in > 5 minutes.
I don't think anyone is advocating killing all older ebuilds, just the ones that do not have a good reason to be kept. For example, glibc-2.9 and gcc-2.95. I think that if we are going to keep things this old in the tree we need a good reason for them. I'm wondering if packages assigned to maintainer-needed should be looked at and removed since no one cares about them after they have sat there for a certain amount of time? William
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