Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk>]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 06:58:40 -0800
"Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I think the argument here is that developers control ebuilds.  If a
> given ebuild is causing 'trouble' for a maintainer it is within their
> control to remove the ebuild.  Just as if a given package is causing
> the maintainer grief it can be deleted from the tree, so can keywords
> for a given arch be removed for a given ebuild (and possibly that
> ebuild removed because it is known to be old and buggy.)
> 
> If the arch team wants that ebuild in the tree they should do some
> work to keep a given package up to date in terms of other arches or we
> should define some sort of metadata that notifies people that the arch
> team is the 'maintainer' for a given version of a package.

The problem is this: the impact upon an arch of dekeywording something
is almost always far higher than the impact of leaving things the way
they are. And even if, like some people here, you don't care about the
arch, the impact upon the rest of the tree when you dekeyword is often
massive. If, for example, an arch were to have their last stable
keyword of something like gtk+ removed by a developer who did it in
order to 'fix' a repoman message, a very large number of other
developers would then end up with a far bigger repoman mess.

Heck, most of the repoman messages people are moaning about are caused
by developers doing exactly this.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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