Bonfire of the Packages

[Jon Turney]

Generally, we have a large number of old, unmaintained packages.

The policy [1] has always been "Packages without an active maintainer 
may be pulled from the distribution.", but not actively enforced (in 
fact prior to 2022, this used to say "are pulled", but I moderated the 
statement, just to reflect reality).

I guess what's needed is an automated process which removes unmaintained 
packages, after some period of time in that state.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about doing that, as they are probably of some 
use, but on the hand I don't think our users are best served providing 
very old packages with unknown numbers of bugs, security problems, etc., 
or which are unsupported upstream.

So, to start with, please give your nominations for the chopping block 
here, or volunteer to rescue them via an ITA.

It would be nice to do this in an evidence-based, data-driven manner, 
prioritising keeping packages that people actually use, but that 
involves building something to collect that data, which I am not 
optimistic about being forthcoming.


Here's my personal list:

* python

After python27 (the last python2 version, which has been sun-setted 
since 2020), both python36 and python37 should be removed (after 
rebuilding any python-* package which don't currently provide 3.8, 3.9 
versions)

* gcc-tools-epoch{1,2}-{autoconf,automake}

These were only relevant to people making patches for versions of gcc 
which are now historical.

* wxWidgets 2.8?

* vte (soverion 9) (as opposed to soversions 2.90 and 2.91)

* llvm3.5 (only depended on by old clamv versions)

* glade2/glade3 should be obsoleted by glade?

* php

We're currently shipping 7.3, which was out of support Dec 2021.

* X11 DEs

There's a large number of X11 Desktop Environments (list at [2]).

I think we should remove the GNOME and KDE DEs, as they are heavyweight 
and do not perform very well under Cygwin.  Ideally the LXDE/MATE/Xfce 
DEs would get a refresh, but it seems unlikely...

(note this means the desktops, not the applications, although our KDE
and GNOME application stacks also need work to be brought up to date)

There's also some GNOME2 and KDE4 era stuff, which is probably all 
obsolete and can be removed.


[1] https://cygwin.com/packaging-contributors-guide.html#submitting
[2] https://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using.html#using-starting-session