Jeremy Olexa wrote:
> Also, devs willing to maintain
> packages but then later retiring and leaving the packages in limbo.
> Maybe there should be some policy such as, when devs retire if no one
> else steps up to maintain the package, then it automatically gets
> moved to sunrise overlay and only maintained packages stay in the
> portage tree.
My opinion is that packages should not be removed from the tree just because
there is no assigned maintainer. Even moving a package to sunrise effectively
makes it invisible to many users, and a great strength of Gentoo is that it
has such a variety of packages in the tree.
I do see that there are potential problems with unmaintained packages, so it
is a good goal to try to solve that. Perhaps developers who have the time and
choose to make themselves available to do simple version bumps on unmaintained
packages could put themselves on a mailing list to receive such bug reports.
Encouraging users to be proxy maintainers is a great idea too (as others have
suggested). As a last resort, otherwise working packages could be masked as
"unmaintained", which is probably better than total removal (after all, they
could still be useful to some users.
-Joe
