On the value (or not?) of stable keywords (Re: [gentoo-dev] Arch Status and Future Plans)

[Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>]

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Arthur Zamarin <arthurzam@gentoo.org> writes:

> Hi all, this will be a long mail, and might be confusing, I'll try to
> organize it, but this is a mess, so bear with me.
>
> [...]
> ======== 32-bit arches ========
>
> This includes stable arches x86, arm, ppc, sparc32, dev arches s390, and
> maybe more. Those are in much worse situation, with a mess on various
> fronts, some of them super hard to continue support. For example
> qtwebengine is less and less likely to manage to compile on a
> real-hardware, and not 32-bit chroot on 64-bit host. Arch Team want to
> minimize our work on those arches, meaning mass-destable and even
> mass-dekeyword, with potentially full drop of stable status.

On stable keywords, there's a few thoughts I have:
* Stable keywords help keep a platform sustainable because you can keep
 it up to date and not be buried under heavy updates (e.g. I sometimes
 get asked to not keyword new GCC versions for the benefit of ~arch-only
 arches)

* For arches without stable keywords, we don't have any reason to
  regularly run the testsuite, so issues which might even be trivially
  solvable go unnoticed. It goes from "running tests whenever there's a
  regular stablereq" -> "once in a blue moon if rekeywording is
  required".

  This part is a shame, but it's also precisely why there's pressure to
  destable things. It's tricky :(

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