Re: [gentoo-dev] new profiles.desc header documenting profile/keyword policy

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

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On Monday 20 January 2014 12:26:13 William Hubbs wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 02:23:24AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > this has all been fairly ad-hoc in the past, so formalize it in the one
> > place that impacts everyone -- profiles.desc.
> 
> If it is policy, shouldn't it go in the dev manual rather than in this
> file?

maybe.  devmanual doesn't talk about this file at all atm.

or maybe i still have it in my head that devmanual.g.o is the ad-hoc 
documentation and not a policy manual -- policy lives in the Gentoo Developer 
Handbook.

> There are several situations in profiles.desk where one profile is dev
> but some profiles that inherit it are exp, for example, the arm
> profiles.
> 
> Which rule applies in this scenario?

both.  when you run `repoman`, it isn't just checking for $ARCH and ~$ARCH 
consistency.  it is doing that for every single profile (one of the reasons 
repoman is slow -- every time we add a profile, that's another dependency tree 
repoman needs to check).  when people say "the dependency tree for $ARCH is 
broken", there's a qualifier in there that people rarely include.  the dep tree 
*for a specific profile* is broken.  usually breakage covers them all, but since 
things like use.mask and package.use.mask and package.mask are done on a per-
profile basis, it's not that uncommon for the breakage to hit a subset of 
profiles.

that means package maintainers are allowed to break exp profiles.  they should 
avoid breaking dev profiles, but they can fall back to filing bugs for the 
profile maintainers (which usually means the $ARCH maintainer).

the quick rule of thumb in terms of "what do package maintainers need to care 
about for $ARCH", then look at it in terms of "what is the best profile 
available for $ARCH".

> Also, from a maintainer's pov, what is the difference between stable and
> dev profiles?

for package maintainers, you get smacked if you break "stable" profiles because 
that's what the majority of users have selected.  if you break a "dev" profile, 
that's not a huge deal as people know things are "in progress".
-mike

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