Hans de Hartog wrote:
Hi,
I'm currently evaluating some exotic packages in the portage tree
and found out that they're almost 2 years old, don't compile or
crash immediately.
When I go to their home page or forums, I see that lots of new
versions have been released.
What to do about this? I'm not going back to the early 90's to
play around with tarballs, ./configure, make && make install and
after a few months end up in the hell of shared library
dependencies and systems being polluted beyond repair.
After all, that's why I've choosen Gentoo in the first place.
Should I
- kindly ask somebody to do something about it?
- try to make an ebuild from a tarball?
- something else?
Check bugzilla to see if there are version bumps + ebuild bugs in there
already. Most of the time, maintainers leave, and the herds are left to
take care of them. If no one in the herd is interested in the package,
then things can stagnate.
If there isn't a bug, feel free to file one. If you have some ebuild
skillz and want to help maintain the ebuild, then let some developers
know that you'd be willing to take care of the package. Or, look at
project Sunrise as well.
There's a lot of things that can be done, and I've just barely glossed
over the basics. Most of the time it comes down to a per-package basis,
and usually the case is that there's just no one interested in
maintaining it.
Steve
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