From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1KzqKv-0003dQ-T6 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:19:06 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D19A5E050F; Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:19:04 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.gentoo.org (smtp.gentoo.org [140.211.166.183]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 89503E050F for ; Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:19:04 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [192.168.1.33] (unknown [193.152.128.100]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A2A1A65382 for ; Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:19:01 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <49195BFA.7060404@gentoo.org> Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:18:34 +0100 From: Jose Luis Rivero User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (X11/20080925) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal for how to handle stable ebuilds References: <20081110181334.GD7038@aerie.halcy0n.com> <4918D0BC.50202@gentoo.org> <4918DE04.8010207@gentoo.org> In-Reply-To: <4918DE04.8010207@gentoo.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 601db258-5166-4526-b92b-89a38d822917 X-Archives-Hash: 65ddd81211ca7b2842c55549b2b683ed Richard Freeman wrote: > Jose Luis Rivero wrote: >> I would prefer to analyze the causes of the slacker arch (manpower, >> hardware, etc) and if we are not able to solve the problem by any way >> (asking for new devs, buying hardware, etc) go for mark it as >> experimental and drop all stable keywords. > > How is that better? Instead of dropping one stable package you'd end up > dropping all of them. A user could accept ~arch and get the same > behavior without any need to mark every other package in the tree > unstable. Accept ~arch for the random package which has lost the stable keyword a random day? And next week .. which is going to be the next? The key is the concept 'stable' and what you hope of it. A long/middle-term solution for arches with very few resources instead of generating problems to users seems a much better approach to me. > An arch could put a note to that effect in their installation > handbook. The user could then choose between a very narrow core of > stable packages or a wider universe of experimental ones. Mixing software branches is very easy in the Gentoo world but it has some problems. Are you going to install in your stable (production, critial, important,...) system a combination of packages not tested before? Because the arch teams or the maintainers are not going to test every posible combination of core stable + universe of experimental packages. This is why branches exists. > I guess the question is whether package maintainers should be forced to > maintain packages that are outdated by a significant period of time. > Suppose something breaks a package that is 3 versions behind stable on > all archs but one (where it is the current stable). Should the package > maintainer be required to fix it, rather than just delete it? Maintainer has done all he can do, this means: that is broken, this version fix the problem, go for it. Maintainer's job finishes here, now it's the problem of your favorite arch team. > I suspect > that the maintainer would be more likely to just leave it broken, which > doesn't exactly leave things better-off for the end users. It's a different approach (maybe with the same bad results) but different anyway. Leave the bug there, point the user to the bug and maybe you can gain a new dev or an arch tester. While the proposal made here is to throw random keyword problems to users by policy (which in the case of amd64 some months ago would have created a complete disaster). > I'm sure the maintainers of qt/baselayout/coreutils/etc will exercise > discretion on removing stable versions of these packages. However, for > some obscure utility that next-to-nobody uses, does it really hurt to > move from stable back to unstable if the arch maintainers can't keep up? Special cases and special plans are allowed, what we are discussing here is a general and accepted policy. > I guess it comes down to the driving issues. How big a problem are > stale packages (with the recent movement of a few platforms to > experimental, is this an already-solved problem?)? How big of a problem > do arch teams see keeping up with 30-days as (or maybe 60/90)? What are > the practical (rather than theoretical) ramifications? An interesting discussion. Ask our council to listen all parts: maintainers, current arch teams, the experience of mips, etc. and try to make a good choice. Thanks Richard. -- Jose Luis Rivero Gentoo/Alpha Gentoo/Do