Re: [gentoo-dev] Editing RDEPEND without a new revision (again)

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 10/24/19 10:03 PM, Michael Everitt wrote:
>
> Forgive my lack of git-fu, but which commit did this? Can we name & shame
> the author and committer publicly, and in front of QA, so that this kind of
> violation is highlighted to all, and noted for future reference?
> 

I left it out on purpose. This isn't a one-person problem, and my anger
isn't only targeted at the last person who was unlucky enough to do it
right before I snapped and wrote the email.

This comes up on the -dev list several times a year. We've fought about
ecosystems adding dependencies to stable packages via eclass USE flags.
We fight about the revision policy in the devmanual. We've been fighting
about dynamic dependencies in the package manager for 10+ years. The
portage team basically quit once over this. A few years later we fought
about it again and finally turned them off, but the commit got reverted
when users complained that developers were constantly breaking things.
That contributed to a fork of the package manager...

Point is, it's not a new thing. And it's a huge waste of time for
everyone involved. It's also simple to avoid. Just make a new revision
when you change something. You shouldn't be changing stable ebuilds
*anyway*, but if you're already going to violate that policy, it doesn't
do any more harm to move it to -r1 in the process.