Why older ebuilds are removed so quickly?

[botinok]

Hello everyone. Maybe this subject had arisen before. If so, could you pinpoint me, where can I find the answers.

I've been using Gentoo for more than a decade. A couple years ago I've noticed that packages have fewer versions. I didn't pay attention to this till I needed to rollback and discovered that it's quite hard to do.

Nowadays in order to rollback a package I have to:

• fetch the gentoo git repo (now I always have a local copy)
  
• find the right commit
  
• checkout it
  
• copy the ebuild to my local repo
  
• update the ebuild
  
• update manifest
  
• install the version I needed
  

This applies to almost every package, bc they have only version - the "latest" one.

WHAT THE HELL?

Why old versions of ebuilds are removed so quickly? Is Gentoo Foundation short on disk space?

[fedeliallalinea]

The removal of a version can depend on many factors, open bugs, inability to compile them with new libraries,...
If then the new version is a minor version it is useless to keep a history.
Specifically what package are you talking about?
_________________
Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't.

[logrusx]

Well, Gentoo is a live distribution. Part of being live is being unable to maintain dead parts. Some things are just frozen in time, other develop slower than the more fundamental and major parts of the system and slowly fall out of compatibility with those fundamental, major or critical parts of the system that cannot stay outdated due to bugs, security issues and so on. You can't have it all, but you can use tools like flatpak. There's another one of that kind too but I don't remember its name as I don't use those.

If you go to github, navigate to the package of interest, you can see the commit history of only this package of category if you will and see the commit message. It may contain a bug reference or directly explain why it's being removed.


Needing to use an older version might indicate an underlying issue with the usage of that ebuild. Please state one or more packages you encountered this difficulty with and why you wanted the old version. There might be a better solution to your problem.

Your procedure to get the older ebuilds seems a bit convoluted too.

And last but not least, sometimes live distributions might not be suitable for your needs.

Maybe say some more words what your needs are, so you can get better advice, even if that means something like "Use Arch/Ubuntu/whatever Linux". It might be better for you.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[mrbassie]

I'm assuming no such thing exists but an ebuild+distfile archive would be a cool toy.
_________________
I spent a christmas in Vienna twenty something years ago. It was a beautiful city. Everyone was so friendly.

[Hu]

The Gentoo git tree provides the ebuild archive. Some forum members, such as Neddy, have large and publicly reachable unofficial archives of distfiles. I'm not aware of a single project that aims to provide both, nor whether the existing ones are exhaustive.

[sam_]

Not going to respond to the original post given its tone.

[Juippisi]

[botinok]

Thanks everyone for your responses.

I'm not going to describe problems of specific packages. I have workarounds.

[rcarz]

I'll whine. KDE 6 packages were marked stable for amd64 three days ago. kde-apps/spectacle:5 was removed from the tree two days later. I need to be able to install one-off packages without doing a world update first.

I recently spent several hours doing a world update piecemeal because KDE, Qt, and Python upgrades were causing a ton of circular blockers. Some of those blockers were fixed by pulling an older portage snapshot with removed ebuilds so emerge could rebuild dependencies in place. That particular machine has my original Gentoo installation from 2004 that I've kept updated (and moves to newer machines as I replace hardware). This is a new-ish problem.

[flexibeast]

Is there a Policy on this? If not, could there be? For example - and i'm just spitballing here - "At least one previous ebuild must be retained, unless this cannot be done for technical reasons (such as a particular hard dependency no longer being available in-tree)."

i've only been bitten by this issue a couple of times since starting to use Gentoo a few years ago - i can't remember the specifics now - but yeah, it's been frustrating given that there didn't seem to be a compelling reason for a previous ebuild to have been removed.

[sam_]

[asturm]

[sam_]

Indeed. I was thinking of some genuine cases where I think it could help but this isn't one of them (at least not as a proper workaround or anything). Just seek help properly and we'll sort it out...

[flexibeast]

[asturm]

[logrusx]

[rcarz]

[finoderi]

[asturm]

[eschwartz]

[ahyangyi]

I have an old Macbook on which I installed a Gentoo with KDE4, and never upgraded it to KDE5. So I maintained a local repository to keep things in KDE4. It turned out to be much more work than I expected, with things like consolekit getting dropped in the upstream, and conflicts with all the newer toys. And I basically gave up by 2021, with more and more issues to fix every day, and also the need to permanently disable the old QtWebkit to have any resemblance to security.

So I appreciate the Gentoo dev's maintenance efforts. So many things were unfortunately just not maintainable.

And as eschwartz has said, becoming a Gentoo developer is the best way to "fix" this kind of problem. And making a working overlay is a first step towards that.