Re: [gentoo-dev] EAPI 6 portage is out!

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 07:01:21 -0500 Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 6:12 AM, Alexander Berntsen <bernalex@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> > When I do QA in projects I'm involved with (at least outside of
>> > Gentoo), we don't do it live on end-user systems. I'll leave the
>> > details as an exercise for the Gentoo developer.
>> >
>>
>> People who run ~arch are not really end-users - they're contributors
>> who have volunteered to test packages.
>
> I strongly disagree with you. We do not use stable even at
> enterprise grade production systems and HPC setups. Stable is just
> too freaking old in order to be usable for our purposes, not to
> mention that it lacks many packages at all. We tried stable
> several times, it just freaks out admins (including myself) too
> badly or results in horrible mess of stable and unstable which is
> less stable that unstable setups. I do not use stable at
> workstations and personal setups as well.

Interesting.  I've had the opposite experience, and don't run ~arch
except for testing purposes.  I don't hesitate to keyword packages
when necessary, and file bugs for their stabilization if appropriate.

Also, if you're doing something like HPC then you're probably focused
on a specific application, with your own QA system, so Gentoo's QA
doesn't really impact you much anyway as your own regression test is
going to catch issues.  I'm not nearly that formal but I've
containerized almost all my services because I don't like relying on
Gentoo's QA.  If I update my mariadb container I just make sure that
mariadb is working, and revert it if not.  If it happens to contain a
broken ssh client it doesn't concern me at all, since I don't use that
container for ssh.  Of course, the downside of this is that I end up
updating a lot of hosts, all for personal use.

> Of course I understand that there are people
> using it and I try to support stable packages as well, but these
> versions are mostly a burden and I can't really understand stable
> users.

Well, to be fair it seems like most Gentoo developers consider half
the tree a burden (that would be the "other" half).  We all have our
itches that we're trying to scratch.  As long as everybody follows the
policies the results end up working out reasonably well for everybody.
Some of us barely test ~arch at all, and others barely test stable at
all, and it seems that for the most part things work out.

In any case, the purpose of ~arch is testing, and is not intended to
be a stable experience, even if it often ends up being that way (which
is certainly nothing to complain about).  If we added another layer of
testing above ~arch, all we'd see happen is that everybody who runs
~arch today would just switch to that, since it would essentially be
the same thing, and ~arch wouldn't really serve any purpose at all.
If the purpose of ~arch isn't testing, then why have it at all?

But, like I said, if somebody wants to volunteer to do a barrage of QA
tests on portage, by all means do so.  It will only make life better
for everybody.  I just don't see any reason to bar the portage authors
from introducing a version if they consider it suitable for testing.

-- 
Rich