[clc-devel] Future of unmaintained
Hi there, I just wanted to start a little discussion about our 'unmaintained' ports collection WRT some recent posts to this list. I think there are actually ports in unmaintained which haven't been updated in a long time; publishing them is kind of annoying for users as they are often broken (this has been pointed out by Markus already). But there is also a good number of ports of which I'm certain some users update them for their uses without publishing the changes; one of the reason why these changes are not published is certainly that we have somewhat agreed not to update ports in unmaintained anymore to motivate people to become CLC maintainers and increase the ports in contrib; this has not (yet) worked out as at least I hoped it would, even though it's already much better than it used to be earlier. So the question is: should we leave unmaintained the way it is, losing potential updates, or should we define some basic rules on creating patches? Related to this is a proposition Matt made on IRC: dropping ports which haven't been updated for a certain amount of time, and I believe this could be combined with the idea to allow changes for the CLC collection: If no maintainer updates a port, and no no patch from a user arrived at CLC for $TIME, a port is moved to a place where it can still be accessed somehow (for historians and port developers), but not served to the user anymore. Best regards, Johannes -- Johannes Winkelmann mailto:jw@tks6.net Biel, Switzerland http://jw.tks6.net
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Johannes Winkelmann wrote: [...]
So the question is: should we leave unmaintained the way it is, losing potential updates, or should we define some basic rules on creating patches?
In short: I would prefer the $TIME method. But $TIME should be at least a few months. And after $TIME without modifications the tags should be removed so it is deleted from unmaintained. The maintainers can still access it, but unmaintained has not the look of hundreds of outdated, rotten ports. Have a nice weekend. Martin
Martin Opel wrote:
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Johannes Winkelmann wrote:
[...]
So the question is: should we leave unmaintained the way it is, losing potential updates, or should we define some basic rules on creating patches?
In short: I would prefer the $TIME method. But $TIME should be at least a few months. And after $TIME without modifications the tags should be removed so it is deleted from unmaintained. The maintainers can still access it, but unmaintained has not the look of hundreds of outdated, rotten ports.
Have a nice weekend. Martin
I think that when (if at all) this is done, the port should be added to some kind of a web page so that people who never even knew about it, might be able to update it so it can stay another few months. After all, isn't the whole point of unmaintained for ports that aren't actively maintained?
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 22:45:51 +0100 Johannes Winkelmann <jw@tks6.net> wrote:
Hi there, [cut]
Hi,
So the question is: should we leave unmaintained the way it is, losing potential updates, or should we define some basic rules on creating patches?
If we backup somewhere old ports for maintainers reference (as you suggest below) I think it's a good idea to save the users some hassle with outdated ports.
Related to this is a proposition Matt made on IRC: dropping ports which haven't been updated for a certain amount of time, and I believe this could be combined with the idea to allow changes for the CLC collection: If no maintainer updates a port, and no no patch from a user arrived at CLC for $TIME, a port is moved to a place where it can still be accessed somehow (for historians and port developers), but not served to the user anymore.
This is a good idea, a volunteer could periodically run a simple script to change the collection* / remove ports that haven't been updated for some time. A possible drawback: there could be ports that didn't actually released a new version for $TIME... Chosing a good value for $TIME could be harder than it seems. Regards, Simone * this way we should have something like contrib, unmaintained and obsolete. Users will only get the first two as usual, maintainers (or users seeking for problems) could add /obsolete to cvsup checkouts.
Simone Rota said|sagte:
* this way we should have something like contrib, unmaintained and obsolete. Users will only get the first two as usual, maintainers (or users seeking for problems) could add /obsolete to cvsup checkouts.
I wouldn't distribute it via cvsup, too many users would just enable it because someone tells them to do it ("take it from there..."). Every maintainer already has CVS access, so just removing all tags from a port would make it obsolete automatically. Markus. -- Markus Ackermann <maol@symlink.ch> http://maol.ch/ http://symlink.ch/
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 22:52:19 +0100 Markus Ackermann <maol@symlink.ch> wrote: [about obsolete ports]
I wouldn't distribute it via cvsup, too many users would just enable it because someone tells them to do it ("take it from there...").
We could all sign a NDA about the existance obsolete ports and use a collection name such as "lsdjflsdjwerkwer6ewr0234324dasdk" :-)
Every maintainer already has CVS access, so just removing all tags from a port would make it obsolete automatically.
Jokes apart, your solution is fine for me. Regards, Simone
participants (5)
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Johannes Winkelmann -
Markus Ackermann -
Martin Opel -
Simone Rota -
Victor