Re: [gentoo-dev] Changing policy about -Werror

[Alon Bar-Lev <alonbl@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 8:33 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> > Let's do this the other way around and be react based on facts and not
> > speculations.
> > Let's change the policy for a year for selected packages as I
> > outlined, monitor bugs and after a year see response times, affected
> > users and if downstream patches are accumulated. Then we can decide if
> > we need to patch upstream packages.
> > If we need to patch upstream package anyway, not follow upstream
> > policy and not accepting input for various of permutations and
> > architecture from all users, this discussion is nearly void.
> >
>
> ...and for how long did you exactly ignore the standing policy that
> suddenly we need a new testing period?  How about we do the opposite
> and you prove a *single* bug found downstream using this method so far?
>
> Because so far this discussion is not much different than "let's make
> the ebuild fail for some values of ${RANDOM}, and add extra values when
> users complain".  Though the variant with random has probably a greater
> chance of failing when *actual* security issues happen.

OK, back to personal discussion, unfortunately you question this in
this principal thread.

Personal response:
In all my years in Gentoo, I've never thought the maintainer lose his
judgement of how to maintain a package as long as the he/she provide a
great service to users.
I've never thought or read this (and other) paragraph as a strict
white and black nor the holy bible , but a suggestion of how to
provide a great service to user with the least overhead to maintainer,
the best practice, the common case.
I believe there was no complains from users about these packages, on
the opposite users report issues and are happy when resolved after
proper investigation.
I guess something had changed recently in Gentoo in which QA try to
take the maintainer judgement try to enforce a black and white
perspective and without looking at bug history and other sources.
I believe this is a regression and not a progression, I was very
disappointed to see this new side of Gentoo in which common sense for
a specific case cannot be discussed individually, nor that a fixed bug
is hijacked to discuss a principal issue without opening a separate
formal QA request to discuss properly, address some of the argument
raised by fellow developers and the reaction of requesting to ban
developers without any mature discussion. As you can see this in this
thread is not black and white.