Re: [proaudio] is this overlay still alive?

["Hector Martin \"marcan\"" <marcan@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-05-10 14:00, sonofzev@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I've only recently.. 
> rebuilt a Gentoo system with this overlay. 
> I've found that there are many packages out of date. 

Yes, there is definitely a lot of cruft in the overlay.

> I've also noticed general issues with cxx libraries (posted regarding
> the building of FFADO) .. 

That's interesting, I actively use libffado-9999 and it builds fine for
me. What are the issues you're seeing?

> Is this overlay still alive? 

I suspect quite a few people still use it, and it does have lots of
useful ebuilds that aren't in upstream portage, but there is definitely
a low level of activity and lots of cruft in the repo.

> I can attempt to help with a couple of ebuilds.. but is it worth it, if
> the activity is generally very low?

I recently attempted a Git conversion of the repo which is hosted here:

https://gitlab.com/proaudio/proaudio

I also fixed issues with some packages and version bumped a couple of
things. Nothing major though. I mentioned this on the list but got next
to no reaction.

I think it's fair to conclude that development activity on the overlay
has slowed to a trickle. Ultimately I guess it's up to individual
contributors, whether old or new, to keep it alive, so lacking feedback
from prior contributors I think it's fair to say we should be free to
jump in and effectively take over maintenance if nobody else is doing that.

Logistically, I don't have access to the SVN repo (or any of the rest of
the existing infrastructure), so I guess the Git conversion becomes a
fork then. From my POV as someone with admin access to the Git repo, I
welcome contributions of any scope, so feel free to send things my way.

For now I plan to continue using the overlay as is and fix things that I
find are broken, though obviously I only use a fraction of the software
in it so I won't notice lots of issues. Depending on how things go, and
whether activity picks up again or not, it may at some point make sense
to do a major cleanup and delete large amounts of unmaintained packages,
or conversely, start with a new overlay from scratch and instead migrate
the ones that are confirmed to work.

I really hope none of the above sounds like some kind of hostile
takeover to existing project members.... I'm really grasping for any
sort of feedback at this stage, but haven't really gotten any.

-- 
Hector Martin "marcan" (marcan@xxxxxxxxx)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc