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

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

Raúl Porcel wrote:
> Peter Weller wrote:
>>
>> Oh, I'd be more than happy to accept help from developers like that.
>> It's just a case of what the "big bosses" think of it. Plus there's
>> the fact that some other arches operate on a "it compiles, mark it
>> stable" policy, and we don't want developers to bring that attitude to
>> the amd64 team.
> 
> Hope you're not referring to any of my arches because that's not true :)
> In fact, if i did that, i wouldn't crash the alpha dev box so often,
> right Tobias?
> 

I dunno - I just hit bug 211021 today while trying to clean out old
bugs.  Already stable on one arch and not a word from the maintainer.

I do agree with many of the posts in this thread by others - a big issue
is manpower.  However, I did want to mention that stabling packages
without input from maintainers seems to be a moderately-common practice.
 I'm sure the arch team leaders would welcome help if it were offered,
but it is more important that packages keyworded stable actually work
than for the latest-and-greatest package to be marked stable.
Interested users can volunteer to be ATs as well - in my past experience
as an AT when I keyworded a bug STABLE I could expect to see it
committed by a dev within a few hours.

While amd64 is a lot more mainstream than it used to be you can't just
assume that upstream wouldn't have released something if it didn't work
perfectly on amd64.

Somebody had commented that there are cases where there are
already-stable packages with bugs in them that are causing problems.
Feel free to ping one of us, or start a discussion on the -amd64 mailing
list, or email the amd64@ alias if necessary if something in particular
is causing major headaches.  Simply posting a comment in bug 37 out of
250 probably won't get much attention.  I'm sure all the amd64 devs want
to do what they can to help out those with more obscure packages.  There
are a LOT of packages marked stable on amd64 though, and while it has
improved greatly upstream still doesn't support it as well as it does
x86 (though I'm sure we won't get much sympathy from most of the other
archs in this regard :)  ).

No disputing that there is a problem - we just want to be careful that
the solution isn't worse than the problem...
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