Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 04:46:36PM -0500, Matthew Clark wrote:
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> 
> 
> David Kowis wrote:
> > As long as we still fix bugs against the "deprecated" grimoire, this is
> > okay. If it's gonna just sit there and rot, then it's not good criteria.
> > If we're going to use this for stuff that's just seldomly used, then
> > that's okay. If it's for stuff that's dead or broken, it's not good.
> 
> I support the entire idea, as I've come across a few spells which could fit 
> into
> such a grimoire.
> 
> I generally agree with the ideas being stated thus far.  I think only
> applications which no longer have upstream maintenance, those which don't 
> have
> an upstream source URL anymore, or those for which documentation is invalid 
> or
> no longer available should be placed in their own grimoire.
> 
> If an application doesn't compile anymore, is too old to be useful, and has 
> NO
> support anywhere (not just upstream), then it should then go straight into 
> the
> removal process to have the spell removed; I see no point in keeping spells
> around that will never work.  If a spell is in such a state, I wouldn't 
> expect
> very many machines to have it anyway.
> 
> I do fear, however, that spells pushed into this "deprecated" grimoire will 
> not
> be maintained as well as the rest of the spells.  But then, who will 
> notice?  I
> suppose the criteria for maintaining these spells would be at least on an
> as-needed basis (as in, only when a bug is filed).  But that's just a 
> thought,
> not a suggestion.
 
I don't see any use in a deprecated grimoire that still requires
maintenance. If a spell is maintained, it stays in
test/games/z-rejected.
The point of having a grimoire for old stuff is that not all spells that
get removed are dead projects. If a project is simply gone completely
from the net, without any source location left, there's of course no
point in keeping the spell. But consider stuff like gstreamer 0.6, that
probably still builds just fine, but I definitely would never waste time
on maintaining it. Same goes for gtk1 versions of stuff, e.g. abiword.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org