On 13 December 2012 17:57, Mike Gilbert <flop...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Jory A. Pratt <anar...@gentoo.org> 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.
