Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Steev Klimaszewski <steev@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 13:07 -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
> When you say "drop keywords" do you mean:
> 
> 1) revert the old version back to ~arch or
> 2) remove the old version.
> 
> As a maintainer, I would rather do 2, because I do not want to backport
> fixes to the old version.
> 
> William
> 

I'm not sure what he meant by drop keywords either, however, something
that I would like to see (with my ARM hat on here) - is, if something is
taking a while to stable for a certain arch, remove the keywords except
for that existing arch.  

We actually ran into something along this issue with git.

Now, arm is an interesting keyword, because for arm, when something
needs to be stabled, we have to test armv4, armv5, armv6, armv6
hardfloat, armv7, armv7 hardfloat, armv7 uclibc.

In my testing, one known issue was that git on uclibc did (and still
doesn't) work properly starting with git 1.8 - so I noted in the bug
that this was the case, and to NOT stable it for arm.  Unfortunately,
someone else on the ARM team disregarded the note and stabled the new
git, then the git maintainers dropped the old versions.  Now on arm
uclibc, git is entirely broken and unusable.

And no, adding more people to the arch team doesn't particularly help,
as people are buying more and more armv7 so they test that, but not the
rest of the versions - and no one wants to buy the older hardware
"because it's so slow" - we know it's slow, that's why it takes time.

I'd have definitely preferred that for git, that the 1.7 version stuck
around with just KEYWORDS="-* arm" (and maybe even stabling 1.8 but
leaving 1.7 in masked?) - I realize it was a bit of a special case
because of the new git eclass.  Unfortunately, debugging what's going
on, is a bit above me, and the only other person I know who can/does
work on it, is blueness, and he's quite busy.