On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:39 -0500 Shea Levy <s...@shealevy.com> wrote:
> Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside > some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't > want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do. For what it worth, I think unmaintained packages should not be removed just for the sake of it, especially when/if their nix-expressions are nontrivial. Suppose currently I'm the only user (or even maybe "ex-user") of a package, the package is some obscure userspace util and so there aren't any security concerns involved, it works (or even maybe "worked") for me, but I don't have any time whatsoever to maintain it. * First, this "remove unmaintained" policy discourages adding new packages to the public nixpkgs by users that are unable to maintain stuff. In the example above, I would better store the package in my own branch than risk it being unexpectedly removed. This would probably imply duplication of work in case somebody else will want to have it at some later point. I wouldn't search all the nixpkgs' forks for a possibility that somebody already has an expression for this package. * Second, I believe making a broken package work is usually easier than writing the nix-expression from scratch. Searching repository history for old removed versions of nix-expressions would be painful. I would rather drop this "remove unmaintained" altogether, at least for current requirements for being a maintainer (especially about the "timely fashion"). Marking unmaintained (or even better: unmaintained and potentially exploitable (which I would define as: it's a daemon or some other package uses it)) packages broken and notifying contributors about this fact looks okay. Cheers, Jan _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev