Re: [gentoo-council] Agenda (draft) for November meeting 2009-11-09

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com>]

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On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 15:56:39 -0700
Denis Dupeyron <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Could the both of you please flesh out a proposal on how you'd expect
> the council to solve these issues? It would best if, on top of telling
> what should be done, you explained why it should be done this way.
> Raising the questions is already interesting but proposing answers is
> even better. You may have done that elsewhere before but summarizing
> it here would help tremendously.

Ok. For this:

> > "Agree upon a wording for PMS for the mtime modification change
> > introduced to EAPI 3 last time"

I honestly don't have an answer to this, nor a preferred solution. So
far as I can see, any possible solution is hit by one of:

* requiring changes to Portage.

* preventing future changes to Portage that would clearly be useful
  (for example, shebang rewriting for Prefix).

* being so vague and unspecific that it is entirely legal for package
  managers not to implement mtime preservation at all.

Obviously the Council had something else in mind when they voted the
proposal in, but the combined wisdom of the PMS team hasn't managed to
work out what that is. Thus, I'd like the Council to explain their
decision in sufficiently precise language that I can convert it to
LaTeX for PMS, and implement it in Paludis.

> > I'd like council to discuss what I consider a major bug in PMS -
> > see the discussion at
> > http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-pms/msg_95a13d880eb521b13d7090f30350c26a.xml  

As for this one, I was hoping Patrick would, as asked, start a
discussion on the gentoo-dev list regarding backwards compatibility and
how much developers care about having a clean upgrade path. I gather
from the previous Council meeting and from other comments that at least
some developers consider not being able to upgrade from an older Gentoo
install as being a problem.

The question, really, is whether there not being an upgrade path is
deliberate, or whether it's an accident that needs fixing. I don't
think that's a decision that should be made without a general
discussion amongst all Gentoo developers, and I certainly don't think
it's a decision that should be made arbitrarily by the PMS editors.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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