Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as a separate, opt-in channel? On Jan 28, 2014 6:43 PM, "Jan Malakhovski" <o...@oxij.org> wrote:
> 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 >
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