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

["\"José Luis Rivero (yoswink)\"" <yoswink@gentoo.org>]

Roy Marples wrote:
> 
> I maintain and play a game called Eternal Lands. I'm a Council member,
> but not part of the games team/herd.
> 
> One of the problems games have with stable/unstable/testing/whatever
> keywords is that upstream changes things that in any other application
> just would not change. For example, the network protocol when talking
> to servers. EL is very version specific and when a new client is
> launched, around once every 6 months they change over right away. That
> means our users need the game right away.

Thanks for the example, trust me if I tell you that we can understand 
the situation pretty well.

> 
> I used to commit EL straight to stable for this very reason, but now
> after a few Gentoo QA people bitched EL will never ever have a stable
> keyword. 

I'm nearly sure that you always (at least) compile and run the new 
version in your box before you sent it to stable, didn't you? So, at 
least, you are able to say that it works in your case.

> So instead I periodically have to let our users know how to
> unmask EL just so they can play their game.

There are always ways to educate users about how to use portage properly.

> So no, in many cases NOT committing straight to stable CAN be
> detrimental to our users if all they want is a games machine. You could
> argue that they shouldn't be using Gentoo, but I would argue why should
> we discriminate?
> 

Ehm, IMHO call it discriminate is a big hard. Are the gnome-2.18 or 
beryl users discriminated or they should be using something different to 
Gentoo? They only thing people have to do is use some ~arch branch 
packages, which isn't too difficult (in Gentoo).

This is how I see it:

Problem with keywording straight to stable is that arch teams are very 
zealous about our stable branch. We put a lot of time trying things to 
not fail in stable, and if an app is broken, we prefer to not force the 
users to compile and install another broken (or unknown to be broken) 
version and work to fix the current stable (patches or bumping) together 
with the maintainer.

But if you send things, that you can't try, to stable, the qa baby jesus 
will cry if it fails, because nobody has taken care of even compile it 
in the arch  :)

Games are not part of core system, so IMHO, use the ~arch branch to have 
the latest cool version to enjoy, could be a good way to go for those 
el1te gam3rs.

Thanks.

-- 
Jose Luis Rivero <yoswink@gentoo.org>
Gentoo/Doc Gentoo/Alpha
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