When last year I started, together with lu_zero, to clean some of the cruft that was causing nothing but bugs in the media-video and sound categories, I ended up submitting quite a few last rite mails to gentoo-dev, more than the average, and I got the nickname of “package undertaker” for a while. This name was then used to refer to tree cleaners, as they started to do about the same as their main task.
I think I ensured that the name is left to me alone when I removed XMMS, as I think with that I beat all records with that, and it’s difficult to come to remove more packages than I removed that time.
And to continue this way, yesterday I sent last rites for 19 more packages, mixed for sound, video, maintainer-needed, kde and ruby herds. Let me try to explain the how and the why of this.
This all started when solar sent out a list of categories with packages missing Manifest2 files, as those packages needs to be cleared up before we can consider an actual passage to Manifest2, together with a script to look up which packages are to be fixed. As media-sound was in the list of the top categories, I’ve looked into fixing the ones I could.
To miss Manifest2, the package had not to be committed to in the last year and a half, which means that all the packages coming up that way are candidate to be killed; although I cannot do anything about that for herds I’m not in, I decided to look up most of them for mines. I’ve looked for packages which SRC_URI cannot be fetched anymore, as well as packages missing commits since 2004; the list was long, and I tried to last rite only the packages that were blatantly broken or with really niche of users (like two packages that required some pretty old digital audio players hardware that as far as I can tell nobody in Gentoo has, and can’t be found in the market).
During this scan, I also found that there are still ruby bindings for Gnome 1.x, that were not removed because the dependencies weren’t expressed correctly. This is unfortunately a widespread problem, together with packages depending on generic gtk+, that needs to be addressed somehow.
So the bottom line is that I’ll clean up those packages next month, reducing again the size of the tree of a bit; see what I meant with other ways to reduce tree size without going the overlays way? This together with KDE 3.5.2 removal (thanks eroyf for taking care of marking 3.5.5 stable on mips!), is a little step forward; Manifest2 will be a big step forward.
Also, to catch two fishes with one string, I’ve fixed dev-lisp packages so that they use mirror://debian/ rather than accessing ftp.debian.org directly, and redirected the ones not present anymore there to mirror://gentoo/, while I regenerated their manifests with Manifest2 format. The problem there is that common-lisp herd seems to be non-existant, and most of those packages could probably be removed or should be updated to newer versions, as they come from Debian and there seems to be newer packages for them.
Today anyway I’ll take the day off, as I promised that if my average commit time reached 1.02 I would, and tomorrow I’ll be back on track to fix, cleanup and remove, as usual.
