Retiring old Gentoo packages

[salimma]

Is there any policy about retiring files from gentoo-sources? I'm downloading at my department - left it as a background process, wisely :p, and am having to prune versions of X as old as 4.0.2 :p

It's still probably going to be 3-4 CDs though. Not too sure, I've only took out the most visible offenders (by size)

Regards,
_________________
Michel

[leifbrown]

considering this thread:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=78&sid=8febe9b2b291190490cb740c27be3dd8
I'm pretty sure you'd hear voices raised in opposition.

But I thought that most of the source code came from the project hosts (kernel from kernel.org, for example, patches & ebuild scripts from ibiblio). In that case, no uniform policy is possible. You just get whatever the project maintainers want to give you.

You *might* be able to convince the project maintainers to make smaller, customized releases, and then convince the package maintainers to take advantage of that in the ebuilds, but that's probably more work than you want to put into it.

[salimma]

What I meant by old packages are things like X402 and X410 - the source packages are still mirrored by Gentoo FTP sites.

I understand that sometimes older packages are needed to maintain compatibility, but X 4.0.2 ?! There are many other examples too. Evolution 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3 are all there, bloating the download directory unnecessarily

Regards,
_________________
Michel