I propose a new QA subproject, the TreeCleaners.
This is a delicate subject for some developers, other developers don't
care, and yet others want the cruft in the tree removed. The Tree
Cleaning project's main goal is to identify broken and unmaintained
packages in the tree and either get them fixed or mask and remove them.
Criteria:
1. Packages slated for removal must have no active maintainer. This is
accomplished by looking in the package's metadata.xml for the maintainer
tag. The maintainer tag must contain an active (non-retired) developer
or team. The tree cleaners will maintain a list of ebuilds assigned to
maintainer-needed; this list may end up on the web similar to Debian's
WNPP[1]. A package with missing metadata.xml is assumed to be unmaintained.
2. Packages slated for removal must have open bugs filled against them.
It is not the policy of the QA team nor this subproject to remove
packages because they have no maintainer. There are plenty of
completely working packages in the tree with no maintainer; we are not
trying to remove those.
3. Packages slated for removal with simple to fix bugs may be fixed by
the tree cleaners if a project member elects to do so. Many of the bugs
are relatively minor ( depend fixes, revbumps, etc ) and could be done
by someone given a bit of time. This isn't meant as a means to
perpetually keep crap in the tree, moreso that in some cases minor bugs
against a package are not grounds for removal.
4. Preferably packages slated for removal shall have a dead or
unresponsive upstream. An upstream that isn't interested in maintenance
means more work for Gentoo in keeping the package up to date. For
packages that already lack a maintainer in Gentoo, a dead upstream means
there is no developer and no upstream for a package; aka no one to do
the work. A dead upstream is not *required* however, crap ebuilds for
packages with an active upstream are still valid to be removed if there
are major bugs filed against them.
5. Packages slated for removal shall have a last rites e-mail sent to
the gentoo-dev mailing list. There will be no packages disappearing
randomly out of the tree due to the tree cleaner project members.
Transparency is key here, both on bugs, in package.mask, and on the
mailing list. developers and users both need to know what is going on.
6. Packages slated for removal shall have a 30 day period in
package.mask prior to removal. This is tree cleaner policy, and it's
one that I hope other developers will adopt. I've seen things pmasked
and removed after a week, a "couple of days", or just pmasked and never
removed. The 30 day period allows everyone using the package to see the
masking message and the corresponding bug when they use portage.
Questions and Comments are welcome, as always.
-Alec Warner
[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
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