[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Alex Berg's message of Wed Jan 29 03:57:56 +0100 2014:
> Rather than removing unmaintained packages, can we make them available as a
> separate, opt-in channel?
Then they will bitrot even faster - because you have to test much more.
It would be possible, I've been using kind of overlays for a long time
(for haskell and ruby packages packaged "my automatic style")
But also see below, git history will be available always ..

@Jan Malakhovski
>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.
Don't forget that history will always be accessible by using git search.
But I agree that its easy to miss that. Its non trivial to estimate how
much complicated packages (let's say openoffice/libreoffice for
instance) also change while packages are broken. In the open office /
libre office case open office was broken too, but the fix was not to fix
open office but to switch to libre office.

There are so many reasons that it does make sense to remove packages
after some time (maybe 6-12 month) which is why its important to
declarate since when they were broken.

At least that's what I think.

The more interesting question is whether we should try to keep all
tarballs mirrored, so that you at least have a chance to install the old
versions which worked once .. - Again nice users statistics would help
determining which source archives to keep.

Marc Weber