[gentoo-dev] Last rites: media-gfx/gmic

Marek Szuba

unread,

Oct 25, 2023, 9:23:04 PM10/25/23

to

Upstream uses a massive home-made Makefile which has since the beginning
required massive amounts of patching to make it behave reasonably
(as well as to fix the problems which ostensibly led upstream to
abandoning CMake, and which they immediately re-introduced in their NIH
solution) and which if anything have only got worse since then. One,
optional, reverse dependency in the tree.
Removal on 2023-11-26. Bug #916289.

--
Marecki

OpenPGP_signature.asc

Jonas Stein

unread,

Oct 25, 2023, 9:30:04 PM10/25/23

to

Hi Marecki,

this is a very powerful package with many users.
Thank you for maintaining it till now.

Could you address the exact problems to upstream, so they are aware and
can improve it?
I think not only Gentoo, but also other distributions suffer if it does
not build smooth.

Looks to me as if the package is not broken now, but there is a lack of
manpower to update it. 30 days is the minimum for a removal.

I suggest to keep it for a few more months.

Best,
Jonas

Eli Schwartz

unread,

Oct 25, 2023, 11:50:05 PM10/25/23

to

On 10/25/23 9:29 PM, Jonas Stein wrote:
> Hi Marecki,
>
> this is a very powerful package with many users.
> Thank you for maintaining it till now.
>
> Could you address the exact problems to upstream, so they are aware and
> can improve it?
> I think not only Gentoo, but also other distributions suffer if it does
> not build smooth.
>
> Looks to me as if the package is not broken now, but there is a lack of
> manpower to update it. 30 days is the minimum for a removal.
>
> I suggest to keep it for a few more months.

It's difficult to tell whether the problems were reported upstream since
upstream has deleted the repository and purged all issues, PRs, commits,
tags, and anything else whatsoever back in April.

The commit message is elucidative: "Clean repository".

Per https://github.com/GreycLab/gmic/issues/1#issuecomment-1521421747

"""
Yes, my fault. I've completely messed up (mainly because I'm still a git
novice after all these years!). I had to delete/recreate the repository
from scratch.
"""

This is of course either untrue or every kind of over-reaction, and
users have commented there to the effect of being willing to help sort
things out but there has been radio silence. It is long past the 90 days
where outright github-level recovery is possible.

I think this also offers some compelling arguments against maintainers
being willing to deal with the challenges of this software -- this is a
pretty steep social cost to investing time and effort into caring about,
using, or maintaining such software.

I suppose it's always possible to orphan the package and let it rot
until it gets last-rited for not working. Marecki -- is there any
specific concern that it's likely to rot quickly if it lacks a maintainer?

--
Eli Schwartz

Marek Szuba

unread,

Oct 27, 2023, 7:30:05 AM10/27/23

to

On 2023-10-26 02:29, Jonas Stein wrote:

> this is a very powerful package with many users.

...but sadly, very few maintainers. It was m-n when I took it over 3
years ago, as apparently no-one found it worth looking after following
the disbanding of the Graphics project - and that was back when upstream
still used CMake! Telling the truth I wasn't exactly interested either,
it's just that it happened to be an optional dependency of
media-gfx/darktable.

> Thank you for maintaining it till now.

You're very welcome!

> Could you address the exact problems to upstream, so they are aware and
> can improve it?
> I think not only Gentoo, but also other distributions suffer if it does
> not build smooth.

I used to do that. It seemed to have little to no effect so in the end I
just gave up.

> Looks to me as if the package is not broken now, but there is a lack of
> manpower to update it. 30 days is the minimum for a removal.

There are two outstanding QA issues (ignored LDFLAGS and pre-stripped
binaries) in 3.3.1 pertaining to USE=gimp and USE=qt5. Prior to adding
that version I tried to leverage qmake-utils.eclass in the Qt parts of
the package, which hopefully would have got rid of these issues - but
resulted in a wall of actual errors. This has been the last straw as far
as me maintaining G'MIC is concerned.

> I suggest to keep it for a few more months.

Fine by me if someone actually maintains it. I've just dropped
media-gfx/gmic back to m-n to make it clear that I do not intend to
block it from being reactivated.

--
Marecki

OpenPGP_signature.asc

Zoltan Puskas

unread,

Oct 31, 2023, 3:00:05 AM10/31/23

to

This is quite a loss. Ever since the dropping the gimp-resynthesizer plugin (due
to Python2 deprecation) gmic was the last package to provide "heal selection"
functionality in GIMP. Losing gmic will put GIMP behind other image editing
software by a significant margin.

I'm wondering if we could collaborate with other distro developers on building
and improving the state of this package. E.g. Debian seems to be packaging gmic
by itself and also for gimp and krita. I wonder if it's possible to build the
gimp plugin portion only and not deal with gmic QT frontend?

Zoltan

signature.asc

Sam James

unread,

Oct 31, 2023, 3:10:04 AM10/31/23

to

Zoltan Puskas <zol...@sinustrom.info> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]

https://github.com/GreycLab/gmic/issues/17 indicates upstream are open
to PRs at least.

>
> Zoltan
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]