[Slackbuilds-users] Author Inactivity Threshold Question Regarding Takeovers

[Tim Dickson]

Sometime there aren't updates for other reasons. for example, there's a 
newer version of generaluser-soundfont than the one on sbo, but it can't 
be updated because it needs a newer version of fluidsynth than that 
which slackware 15.0 ships with.
As time goes on, more and more packages are affected by this sort of issue.

So lack of updates on a package is not a definitive metric, which makes 
automating such an approach problematic.

The "email to maintainer, and then if no response after a few weeks, 
email to the list" is the current approach, which seems reasonable.
Unless there is a way to indicate in the slackbuild that it can't be 
updated because of dependencies either directly supplied by slackware, 
or indirectly via a sbo dep/s which can't be updated for a similar 
reason, we have no way of knowing why a package may be old. however we 
don't currently have a way of indicating that a particular package is 
limited because of a dependancy version/s apart from the readme. This is 
even more open-ended for optional deps. large amounts of gnome stack is 
waiting for a newer slackware before it can be updated.

  As there is currently no way to indicate this in a way that can be 
automated (we just have comments in readme's), it does mean that from 
time to time someone will say "sbo x needs updating" and then the 
maintainer or list or admin has to inform the user of the reason why it 
can't be updated at the moment.
We would need to come up with a flexible standard way of indicating this 
sort of issue in the .info file or a formalised way of indicating it in 
the readme which could be reliably parsed.
regards, Tim

-- 
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software.
www.avg.com