[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Alex Berg]

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" <oxij at oxij.org> wrote:

> 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
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