On 01/03/2017 09:14 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
On Tuesday, January 3, 2017 12:05:10 PM EST Michał Górny wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2017 16:00:52 +0700 (+07)
gro...@gentoo.org wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2017, Brian Evans wrote:
IMO, this one should be given last-rites as upstream is dead and it
heavily depends on wireless-tools and WEXT.
I use it on 2 notebooks. It works fine, and is (from my point of view) the
most convenient tool to control ethernet and wifi connections on a
notebook. Why lastrite it when it works?
This is the Gentoo Way™. Having a working software is not a goal.
Gentoo focuses on the best bleeding edge experience and therefore
highly relies on software packages that are under active development
and require active maintenance. The packages in early stages of
development are especially interesting since they can supply users
and developers with variety of interesting bugs and unpredictable
issues.
Do we have detailed treatise documenting the points and counterpoints to "Why
lastrite it when it works?" It's a question that comes up every month or two,
and the reasons, for and against, are probably mature enough to get numbers,
now.
Reason #3 in favor: "It works for me" may only be valid from a particular
perspective. Without active maintenance, there may be subtle bugs that aren't
immediately obvious. Bugs that aren't immediately obvious aren't always
innocuous; sometimes they're insidious background data loss. Other times, they
might be security vulnerabilities no good guy has yet noticed.
...and sometimes a package just stop being "actively" maintained because
it is feature-complete (as far as the goals of the project were
concerned) and just works.
The minimum conditions to lastrite something should be not actively
maintained _and_ with open bugs that either compromise security or
affect normal usage subject to the condition that it is not still used
by users. I do not think at this point in time Gentoo devs have any mean
to know the popularity of different packages, but that would be a must
to take proper decision as far as retiring packages goes.
-- Just a random Gentoo user.
