Ah, I didn’t realize the keepassx default.nix and community.nix have different maintainers - sorry, my bad.
Does marking things broken kind of achieve that?
Not really. It is better in a way that broken packages are not easily installable, so no-one has to really keep an eye out for security issues etc. but I feel like that is not happening for unmaintained / semi-actively maintained packages anyways I feel.
However, broken packages still impose workload on non-primary maintainers, eg. when work is done across packages, like issue #103997 or worse, when there are leaf packages or tests that depend on broken packages and will light up on hydra or equivalent.
The thing is, marking a package as broken does not impose any work on the person who does it, eg. you can mark a library as broken and not notice or make you care about which packages down the line will be affected.
When removing such a package completely, the evaluation of the nixpkgs tree should more often than not fail if something depends on that package, which should reduce friction for later issues.
This is off topic, but personally when I see a package with no maintainers, I take that as a, “no one cares about me”.
If i do some research, and I find that it’s only been a target of automatic or treewide changes for a while, I’ll usually open a PR to have it removed. I’ll cc everyone who has touched it over the past year or two. If no one responds, then it will most likely not be missed.
Examples:
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/104351
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/98351
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/95948
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/95351
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/95349
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/95347
EDIT:
It’s not like I go around looking for packages to murder. Generally these begin failing due to some other dependency being updated. And then I make the decision to fix it or just get rid of it.
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Lets hope packages that ‘no one cares about’ are not made in Nebraska
This thread show me that nixpkgs need paid full times administrator/gatekeepers/maintainers because it’s a victim of it’s both it’s size and it’s success.
I feel a pateron coming on.
Then again full time paid maintainers will need to be thick skinned to soak up the flack i’ve seen in this thread…
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Nixpkgs makes querying this pretty easy. We would see ofborg failures if I removed something that others were dependent on.
Related discussion: We need more defined guidelines for package inclusion - #22 by timokau
The whole thread is somewhat related, but the linked post is the start of the maintainership focused discussion. I tried to avoid linking to my own post, but that seems to be the one where the conversation shifts.
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