[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Jan Malakhovski]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:36:39 -0500
Shea Levy <shea at 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