Re: long-broken packages (some are removal candidates)

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> writes:

> On 4/2/2012 20:16, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>> Step forward and fix them then. You haven't tried so far, have you?
>> Perhaps, it is not hard with some diligence and at least minimal knowledge.
>> If you don't want to fix them, don't touch them then. Please, spend your
>> efforts on anything more constructive than pushing your views which packages
>> deserve to live and which do not.
>
> Where I'm from, this is called hypocrisy.  My response was to
> yours, which pushed views on which packages deserve to live.
> And yes, I tried to fix a number of them including stlport,
> aqsis, centericq, ArX and ocamlduce.

I fixed a number of them too, but that still doesn't mean that I can do
everything at once.

>> I don't have time to deal with all this at once, and all you do with your
>> proposal is nothing but forcing your personal views which packages are
>> useful to people outside you or your community and which are not based
>> on reports for one particular operating system (NetBSD) running on one
>> particular platform (amd64).
>
> It's got nothing to do with usefulness.  If it's broken, and
> nobody *including you* is intending to fix it, then the
> pragmatic thing to do is kill it rather than leave it for more
> *years* on the broken list.

It has _everything_ to do with usefulness. If it is useful, it should be
either fixed or left alone. It may just work for people who use it.

Sometimes it does take years to fix something. Some fixes are way more
involved than you think. All you can do with it then is staying aside and
watching, if you don't want to participate in heavy lifting or massive
code churn. That's why the pragmatic thing is to leave those packages alone,
if you personally cannot do anything.

One of recent examples is the story of fixing Octave. Your approach
would be to kill the package even if it just worked for some people due
to some unknown magic. OctaveForge package is another heavy lifting
which should be done nevertheless, if you want wider pkgsrc acceptance.
Your approach here is to remove it and thus reduce the value of NetBSD as
educational platform. I understand that you may care nothing of educational
packages, but then you shouldn't cramp others' efforts.


-- 
HE CE3OH...