proactively deprecating things that should be -- base design wg [was Re: Maybe it's time to get rid of tcpwrappers/tcpd?]

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 07:18:58PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> It's a pity though that nobody in Fedora is actively working on getting
>> rid of legacy cruft. I really wished we had some people who oversee
>> deprecating things more proactively, figure out how to deprecate things,
>> write stub code to provide smooth transitions, write release notes and
>> so on. Being at the bleeding edge of things also means deciding that
>> some things really should go, from time to time...
>
> I absolutely agree. This should be an important fuction of the Base Design
> working group. Before that, we also have a "Minimal Core" SIG with some
> interest but not much activity (that last may somewhat be my fault, since I
> kicked it off but my attention wandered).

You should really make a point of telling the Base WG this directly.
Nobody in that WG even has something like this on their radar.  At the
moment it's just reviewing Tech Specs looking for Base work items
(none found), discussing the concept of Base, and doing some
dependency trimming.

>
>>                                                    Besides deprecating
>> old cruft like libwrap, this would also mean removing all the old crap
>> from comps "standard" that we still install by default (894110)...
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=894110
>
> There wasn't previously a great framework for discussing this kind of thing.
> I hope that we do have that now. And just as you don't have to be a voting
> WG member to contribute to a product SIG, it would be helpful for anyone
> interested in this to provide constructive feedback to the Base Design
> group.

It would if the Base Design group thought that kind of thing was
something FESCo wanted them to tackle.  Please help the WG more
clearly define the things they're supposed to be doing.  IMO, the Base
WG seems to have been created because someone thought it would be a
good idea to have one without really elaborating on what that meant.
As a byproduct, the WG is left to figure it out on their own and
hasn't really firmly grasped what it's for.

It is the WG equivalent of staring at the stars and wondering "why do I exist?".

josh