Re: Removing the attic package

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Sep 04, 2016 at 01:10:39PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> There has been no update since 2015. Can the current status of the bug
> (solved? unsolved? wontfix? work in progress?) be requested from the
> upstream developer(s)?

The upstream developer has not replied to the bug report [0]. I think we
can assume "wontfix" after 11 months.

> Otherwise the bug reads like we should include it in our package
> description, pointing out that it is currently limited to 15GB backup
> (if that's what this was about, I did not read all of it).

The bug is that if your disk becomes full, the backup repository will be
permanently corrupted, and you will *lose all your backups*.

I think the project is abandoned, even though it has only been ~15
months since the last public commit, which is not really that long if
the software is working well. But, it's not working well; this is a
critical bug.

Here is some context:

I was following Attic development before it stopped. There were several
Attic users who wanted to assist with Attic development, but the Attic
author explicitly rejected their help [1]. It appears that the Attic
author abandoned Attic after the Borg fork.

I don't want to steer new users towards this broken software, and I
think removing the package is a safe choice. Current Attic users could
continue to use it, because it won't be removed from their profile
unless they do `guix package --remove attic`. And Borg can convert Attic
repos for users who are interested in moving on, so these users will not
lose access to their data even if they do uninstall Attic on their
machines.

Do we have any guidelines about "retiring" packages?

[0]
https://github.com/jborg/attic/issues/356

[1]
https://github.com/jborg/attic/issues/217#issuecomment-78091278