2012/12/13 Jory A. Pratt <anar...@gentoo.org>: > > As many of us are aware the tree is growing to a size that is really > unacceptable for many. We have many packages that have excessive amounts > of versions laying around that are not used any more. Many of these > packages with excessive revisions most likely do not work with modern > code any longer, or have security exploits or just dead upstreams that > do not support them any longer that have been replaced with newer > packages. Well these packages are around for stable at the moment when a > newer package replaces the old and makes stable branch we need to remove > the dead package. This is nothing but an attempt to start reducing the > size of the tree and supported packages as a whole to improve the > quality of Gentoo as a WHOLE. All packages of course need to be handled > in a manner that works with maintainers/herd and the community as a whole. > > Jory > > Please press enter more often when sending mails :P So we can in-post rather than bottom/top post to your mails.
I totaly agree that we should reduce amount of versions we provide in main tree and I tried to adhere to this policy in all herds I am member of or whenever I found some insane stuff in cvs. 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 ;-) Long story short for to have some sane policy wrt amounts of the stable packages. Testing packages can't be handled easily by some rule because the development differs everywhere. Packages should provide only one stable version per branch/slot by default. Exception for this rule are base-system packages where requirement is to provide two stable versions at any given time.
