Re: [gentoo-dev] Gnome Stabilization 3.6 or 3.8

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

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 9:08 PM, Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 08/08/13 20:57, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Stability is about the quality of the ebuilds and the user experience
>>> in general.  It is not a statement that all Gentoo developers think
>>> that the package is useful.  Many would say that nobody should be
>>> using MySQL/MariaDB for production work, but that has nothing to do
>>> with its stability as a package either.
>>
>>
>> This is not entirely correct.
>>
>> If from now on, a bug with systemd of new version of a package blocks
>> that package stabilization, it means that all developers must support
>> systemd. So having systemd stable is a decision that should be made by
>> the entire community, and have huge overhead on us all.
>
>
> That's not really true with systemd when the unit files (and related) are in
> a format that they can be carried also by upstream and can be shared between
> distributions. They are comparable to logrotate or bash-completion files.
>
> You don't necessarily use distcc, ccache, clang, ... and yet you let people
> compile packages you maintain using them.
> You don't necessarily use uclibc, yet you allow users to compile the
> packages against it and expect them to file bugs if something is broken.
> You don't necessarily use selinux and yet support building against
> libselinux where possible.
> You don't necessarily use zsh as your shell and yet let zsh-completion files
> to be installed when requested.
>
> Yet any of the mentioned packages can be stabilized, what makes systemd so
> special that it can't follow the same rules as other packages?

logrotate, autocompletion are not functional dependencies.

uclibc - is not mainline, people who use it for embedded are aware the
it may be broken every bump.

autocompletion, distcc, ccache etc... are optional components which
can be disabled, while having usable system until issue is resolved.

selinux - if a package breaks selinux it will be reverted (if
maintainer care about his users) until resolution is found.

as you may have unusable system if a bump does not support specific
stable init layout, you do expect rollback similar to libselinux
issue. init layout is not optional package nor optional feature, it
how the system operates.

>> So apart of the politic message, there are implications of maintenance
>> efforts, stabilization efforts.
>
>
> Just the normal efforts.
>
>
>>
>> I appreciate the discussion at debian, it is not wise to support [I am
>> adding: at stable] more than one solution for layout.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Alon Bar-Lev.
>>
>
>