Re: [gentoo-dev] tentative x86 arch team glep

[Tom Martin <slarti@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 01:12:54AM +0200, "Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org> wrote:
> We seem to be heading towards a situation where the x86 arch
> team do all marking of stuff stable on x86.  This I like.
> Some observations - these may be phrased in the affirmative
> but please take them as observations/suggestions :)
> 
> 1) The x86 arch team will need to be large(ish) to keep pace.
>    Herds could nominate one of their members to join the
>    team; that'd get a fair amount of tree coverage quickly.
> 
> 2) The job of the x86 arch team members should be to arrange,
>    collect and collate testing results, not to do the actual
>    testing themselves.  Note this means being a member of the
>    x86 arch team is a management role rather than a development
>    or test role.

I'm not sure I like this. I think it would be too slow. I'd rather have
a concept of maintainer arch (the reason I still like the old keyword
ordering, because there was at least *some* idea of maintainer arch. In
fact, I used to fiddle the keywords every now and again when I took over
a package and the maintainer arch changed). Policy, for a long time, has
been that no arch team should go stable ahead of a package maintainer
without his approval. This works fine. Now, some packages are going into
Portage without the x86 keyword (for example, viewglob, which I recently
committed. I don't have an x86 machine) and a non-x86 maintainer. All
that we need is an x86 arch team to do the same jobs as other
architectures:

a) Test packages that aren't yet keyworded.
b) Keep keywords up-to-date -- imlate. Although imlate currently
	compares against x86 by default, scanning x86 against a few other archs
	isn't a major bottleneck.
c) Keep up with security bugs, with a proper security contact. Tester, I
	believe you're filling this role at the moment?
d) Possibly arch testers.

Maybe I'm seeing this all wrong, but the fact is, the number of packages
that need x86 arch team lovin' are pretty small, despite the number of
overall keyworded packages being large. I don't think the x86 arch team
needs to be very large: I think ten developers is plenty. I just don't
know what they'd be doing if there were more.

Thoughts?

-- 
Tom Martin, http://dev.gentoo.org/~slarti
AMD64, net-mail, shell-tools, vim, recruiters
Gentoo Linux

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