Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Proposal for how to handle stable ebuilds

[Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 18:38 -0600, Ryan Hill wrote:

<snip>

> The maintainer MUST NOT NEVER EVER NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT remove the
> latest stable ebuild of an arch without the approval of the arch team or
> he/she will be fed to the Galrog.

As long as the maintainer can pass off the maintenance of the (sometimes
dozens) of ancient ebuilds that need to be kept around for that one arch
to the arch team, and re-assign any resulting bugs to them, fine.  Or,
alternatively, unilaterally decide to drop all keywords for the arch in
question.

Yes, that was extreme, but no more than the previous quoted statement.
There needs to be give and take here.  Yes, it's really bad to remove
the last stable ebuild for an arch.  However, its *also* bad to have to
maintain years old versions of lots of ebuilds.  And yes, it will be a
lot, since most packages don't exist in a vacuum, and require older deps
(which possibly will be maintained by other maintainers than the first
package, causing a cascade of old packages in the tree).

All this will do in practice is cause maintainers to ignore bugs for
those old packages for those few arches, since the maintainer won't have
that version installed.  In fact, in my experience, they frequently
*can't* have that version installed, since it requires older versions of
other packages that need to be upgraded to maintain newer versions of
the same package.

How much bit rot do we want in the tree?

Daniel (who is both an arch team member and gnome team lead)