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Gentoo Tree Cleaning Team

Content:

1.  Project Description

Gentoo currently has a number of packages that lack maintainers and are broken in one or more ways. Due to the large number of packages that exhibit this behavior in the gentoo package database the tree cleaner subproject was created. The overall goal of this subproject is to reduce the number of unmaintained and broken packages in the tree. This is accomplished by either finding a maintainer for the package, fixing the package, or removing the package from the package database.

2.  Project Goals

To find and remove broken and unmaintained packages from the tree.

3.  Developers

Developer Nickname Role
Samuli Suominen drac Lead
Raúl Porcel armin76 Member
Steve Dibb beandog Member
Doug Goldstein cardoe Member
Jeremy Olexa darkside Member
Ryan Hill dirtyepic Member
Raphaël Marichez falco Member
Jakub Moc jakub Member
Roy Bamford neddyseagoon Member

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

4.  Subprojects

The TreeCleaners project has the following subprojects:

Project Lead Description
Gentoo Packages that Need Lovin' Steve Dibb The GPNL is a website that is currently under development to list packages that need maintainers, and dynamically query for common QA bugs.

5.  Contact

The TreeCleaner project is available at treecleaner@gentoo.org

6.  Gentoo Packages that Need Lovin' (GPNL)

Removing a package isn't the only solution offered by the tree cleaner project. The project strives to maintain a list of packages that have no maintainer. This package list is created by two methods. One is to look in the tree for packages lacking a metadata.xml file. The second is to look at packages assigned to maintainer-needed in metadata.xml. The final method involves looking on bugs for bugs assigned to maintainer-needed. All of these methods are combined to create the Gentoo Packages that Need Lovin' (GPNL) list. This exists to encourage users and developers to locate neglected packages and fix any problems that they may have. The GPNL is still under active development.

7.  Package Removals

CVS Attic

All ebuilds, including deleted ones, are available from the web interface to Gentoo's CVS repository, which you can find at http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/. Ebuilds and directories that have been removed will appear in the Attic, and can be accessed by clicking the (Show <n> dead files) link at the top of the folder view. You can then download any ebuilds you may need from ViewCVS and place them in a local overlay, where they can be installed as normal. Any distribution files will remain on Gentoo's mirrors for at least two weeks after the ebuild is removed from the tree, and even after removal from our mirrors they will in most cases continue to be available from the original source.

But I love that package!

I'm glad you like that package, however without a maintainer it sits stale in the tree. Maintaining a package involves a time commitment, even if your ebuild you submitted to bugzilla works, or your patch works, it takes time fixing other bugs, testing the package, checking for updates, and so on. Sometimes there is no one to take this resposibility on. If you are confident there are enough users for the package, feel free to take it to Gentoo Sunrise once the ebuild has been removed from the tree (not before mind, their policy states you can't have something in sunrise and the tree, so be patient). For more information on Sunrise please see gentoo-sunrise.org and #gentoo-sunrise on chat.freenode.net.

8.  TreeCleaner Docs

The TreeCleaner Project currently have two docs:



Print

Updated May 23, 2008

Summary: The Tree Cleaning Team is primarily concerned with removing unmaintained and broken packages from the tree. We aim to make less work for everyone by reducing the number of broken and unmaintained packages in the tree. We also aim to increase the user experience by removing broken packages from the tree; therefore users have less hair-raising experiences with packages in-tree that just don't work.

Alec Warner
Author

Charlie Shepherd
Author

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