Re: [gentoo-dev] Please follow keywording policy

["Stephen P. Becker" <geoman@gentoo.org>]

> I don't really intend to drop my jobs to others - this isn't me, I take 
> my responsibilities very seriously. But if you think you'll be doing a 
> better job by taking it, please, be my guest. I don't want to appear as 
> the guy who broked Gentoo's QA procedures...

Nobody is asking you to drop your job.  However, what people are saying 
is if you don't have hardware, then how can you properly maintain a 
driver for it?  If I didn't have any mips machines, how could I be a 
member of the mips team?  Instead of trying to maintain a bunch of 
drivers that you can't test, why don't you recruit some more devs for 
the dialup herd who do have such hardware?  You can create a team that 
coordinates through you to ensure good QA for these drivers.

> 
> I'm only annoyed by the bad attitude of some devs who will get involved 
> only what suits them, forgetting that if they would not help, no one 
> will.

Again, other developers can only get involved (in this situation) if 
they have hardware.

> Btw, what is the sense of ~arch if not "testing"? No gentooer 
> expects from a ~arch ebuild to be stable, so the sky would not fall if 
> you made a mistake and release it under this keyword. When I hear "I 
> cannot mark foo library as ~arch because I don't know how to test it" 
> smells like excuse to me.

Either you are confused or you are trying to turn this into a subtle 
troll.  This fork of the discussion started in reference to *stable* 
keywording with respect to the rp-pppoe bug you used as an example.  I 
usually have no problem marking something ~arch if it compiles, since 
~arch just means it is a candidate for possibly becoming stable some 
time in the future.  Anyone using ~arch keywords should be prepared for 
a bumpy ride.  However, once that ebuild goes stable, in theory it 
should JustWork(TM) with no problems.  In this particular case, none of 
the mips team could vouch that rp-pppoe JustWorks(TM).

> As for QA... does anyone think we *can* have proper QA procedures, with 
> our release speed and decentralized development model? 

Sure.

> And with only ... 
> 350 devs from which God knows how many are still active?  :-D
> Who thinks that clearly doesn't have a clue what QA means. It is 
> practically impossible to test every combination of ebuilds/USE/CFLAGS 
> so all we do is a surface test, letting the burden of testing on the 
> shoulders of our users.

This is what ~arch is for.

> Despite of our unorthodox development process, many people believes 
> (including me) that our distro surclass traditional ones and is 
> generally more stable (go figure!).

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.  Stating that we have an 
excellent distro doesn't mean that we can bypass QA policy.

> Maybe I'm too exigent, but I only ask from people to do what I do : be 
> genuinely interested in helping the devs who need it. Heck, I always try 
> to help any gentooer, dev or not. We all have our little systems because 
> our predecesors have worked on it, not because they  sit down and 
> debated whether to mark foo ebuild as ~arch or not.

Again, you are referring to ~arch, which is not what the original 
problem was with.


Steve
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list