[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Thomas Bereknyei]

That almost sounds like an "unstable" channel.


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Alex Berg <chexxor at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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