PMC commetns on: Re: Qt4 removal plan

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Kamil Rytarowski <n54%gmx.com@localhost> writes:

> On 25.10.2019 13:29, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
>> I propose to obsolete and remove Qt4 from pkgsrc.
>> 
>> Most of the existing users of qt4 packages are KDE4, everything else is
>> dead upstream.
>> 
>> Many of the distributions already did it:
>> 
>> https://wiki.debian.org/Qt4Removal
>> 
>> The last version of Qt4 4.8 LTS (4.8.7) was released in 2011 and is
>> unsupported since 2015.
>> 
>> Qt5 is around since 2012.

First, I think it's great that packages that depend on qt4 are getting
upgraded to qt5.

PMC discussed, and while there is no desire in favor of qt4, some brief
comments about removals:

The point of pkgsrc is to provide packages to be used by users.  There
are reasons why people use obsolete software, and we do not in general
remove things solely because they are unmaintained upstream.

To remove a package, there should be some combination of

   the package is a leaf package

   the package is abandoned upstream

   we believe that there are essentially no users, or only a small
   number of users relative to the actual brain time used up by the
   package remaining.

   the package is entirely broken for an extended period of time
   (unbuildable on substantially all platforms that pgksrc runs on)

with deletion proposed on pkgsrc-users with rationale, unless it's
pretty obvious there aren't users.

As for broken in this case, qt4 builds fine on NetBSD 8/amd64 (I just
rebuilt it), which is arguably our canonical platform.  I don't see it
showing up in the bulk reports for 9.0_BETA or SmartOS.  (I realize
there are likely build failures on newer platforms with shinier
compilers.)

(So far, it looks like all the removals are fine, as some combination of
long dead and very likely no one is using it, so this message is not a
complaint about what's happened.)

Running "finddepends x11/qt4-libs" yields 588 lines in pkgsrc (and
another 205 in wip).  So we're clearly a long way away from actually
removing qt4.  Of course, each upgraded package is a win for users as
the desire to do anything that depends on qt4 is reduced.

Thanks to everyone for their stewardship of pkgsrc for our user
community.