Re: [gentoo-dev] Keywording, for the umpteenth time

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 20 May 2005 15:51:51 -0500 Brian Jackson <iggy@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better from a QA perspective to go back to the (really)
| old policy of dropping anything you can't test on. I know that puts
| more work on you guys, but this is only going to get worse as we get
| more devs. Wouldn't it be better to nip this in the bud now. Maybe
| broaden the arch teams by giving some devs access to remote boxes.

Not really. Dropping to ~arch when bumping works well. Sure, ~arch does
occasionally end up broken, but it's better than us lagging behind
massively. There're too many packages and not enough people these
days...

The assumption is, if foo-1.2 works on, say, sparc, then foo-1.3
probably will too to the extent that we're happy for it to go to ~sparc.
On the other hand, we're *not* confident enough in upstreams' abilities
to always put out perfect releases that we're prepared to move things to
stable without explicit testing.

See, we *really* don't want arch to get broken. We'd rather ~arch didn't
break either, of course, but taking the occasional hit there is
acceptable if it lets us keep everything up to date.

| Get every dev access to all the supported arches (some of this could
| probably be done with emulators of some sort, qemu or somesuch). Make
| them test on every arch before they change any keywords.

Not gonna happen. Emulators don't cut it and won't find all the problems
(but they will find a load of other bogus non-issues). Plus, from
experience I'd say that at least half our devs wouldn't have a clue
where to start when doing arch testing...

Then there's the issue of most alt-archs having far higher QA standards
than x86 anyway, and us not wanting to sink to what x86 considers
acceptable for marking stable.

From experience -- the current policy as it is now *works*, so long as
everyone follows it.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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