[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Marek Szuba]

Dear everyone,

Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of 
stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
  - hppa,
  - ppc,
  - sparc,
  - x86
to ~arch-only status.

Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those arches 
altogether.

There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
  - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either aren't 
really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for 
the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)
  - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in 
case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently, 
stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
  - feedback we receive, e.g. by Bugzilla, suggests that Gentoo on at 
least some of these arches have got very, very few users
  - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last 
several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free 
these days

WDYT?

-- 
Marecki

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Roy Bamford]

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On 2021.10.14 14:40, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> 
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number
> of 
> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>   - hppa,
>   - ppc,
>   - sparc,
>   - x86
> to ~arch-only status.
> 
> Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those
> arches 
> altogether.
> 
> There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
>   - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either
> aren't 
> really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones
> (for 
> the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)
>   - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and
> in 
> case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently, 
> stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
>   - feedback we receive, e.g. by Bugzilla, suggests that Gentoo on at 
> least some of these arches have got very, very few users
>   - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last 
> several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free 
> these days
> 
> WDYT?
> 
> -- 
> Marecki
> 
> 
> 

Only x86 raised an eyebrow here but only one, and not very far.
It has to come sooner or later, so if not now, then when?

Datapoint: On the forums, x86 installs are either done by mistake
or by users who know what they are doing on a 32 bit SoC,
The first set of users will be helped, the second set know what they 
are doing.

In case its not clear after all that waffle, I'll go with the flow.

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
elections
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
arm64

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Michał Górny]

On Thu, 2021-10-14 at 15:40 +0200, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> 
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of 
> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>   - hppa,
>   - ppc,
>   - sparc,
>   - x86
> to ~arch-only status.
> 

I don't have a strong opinion either way.

On one hand, I fully realize that these platforms are a hassle (hppa
and x86 especially).  On the other hand, I wouldn't want to basically go
tell Dakon "sorry, you're doing a good job but we've arbitrarily decided
it's not worth your effort".

While we're discussing it, maybe we should start by defining a clear
criteria for platform support tiers?  Like: what are the requirements
for a platform to maintain stable keywords?  Then the decisions could
look less arbitrary, and people would have a clear way of knowing what
they need to do if they wish the platform to continue having stable
keywords.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Joonas Niilola]

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On 14.10.2021 20.10, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-10-14 at 15:40 +0200, Marek Szuba wrote:
>> Dear everyone,
>>
>> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
>> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
>> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of 
>> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>>   - hppa,
>>   - ppc,
>>   - sparc,
>>   - x86
>> to ~arch-only status.
>>

Yes please. Still confused why people by default push KEYWORDS="~amd64
~x86", but I guess they're the most compatible with each other.

> 
> On one hand, I fully realize that these platforms are a hassle (hppa
> and x86 especially).  On the other hand, I wouldn't want to basically go
> tell Dakon "sorry, you're doing a good job but we've arbitrarily decided
> it's not worth your effort".

Isn't this just strengthening the point; there's one guy behind all work ;)

> 
> While we're discussing it, maybe we should start by defining a clear
> criteria for platform support tiers?  Like: what are the requirements
> for a platform to maintain stable keywords?  Then the decisions could
> look less arbitrary, and people would have a clear way of knowing what
> they need to do if they wish the platform to continue having stable
> keywords.
> 

++

-- juippis


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Agostino Sarubbo]

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On giovedì 14 ottobre 2021 15:40:02 CEST Marek Szuba wrote:
> WDYT?

I agree for arches that have exotic hardware but I'd keep x86 since 
testing can be done on amd64 via 32bit chroot.
On the other hand I'm pretty sure we have few x86 users so, 
sooner or later, x86 will go into ~arch as well.

Agostino


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Mikhail Koliada]

On 14.10.2021 16:40, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
>
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number 
> of stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>  - hppa,
>  - ppc,
>  - sparc,
>  - x86
> to ~arch-only status.
>
> [..]
>
> WDYT?
>

There arches are mostly exotic these days, so marking them unstable is 
only going to reflect it more (which is right, respective arch teams 
might still support the stable profiles to make sure we are fine with 
the deptree),

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Rolf Eike Beer]

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Am Donnerstag, 14. Oktober 2021, 15:40:02 CEST schrieb Marek Szuba:
> Dear everyone,
> 
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of
> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>   - hppa,
>   - sparc,
> to ~arch-only status.
> 
> There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
>   - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in
> case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently,
> stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
>   - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last
> several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free
> these days
> 
> WDYT?

Reducing to what I have a personal opinion about.

For quite a while I have been more or less the arch testing team for hppa and 
sparc, the latter reduced since ago and sam meanwhile utilize even faster 
machines to do much of the the sparc work (yay!). Running these machines is a 
bumpy ride. Things break quite regularly, besides the arch-independent 
breakage like missing dependencies or similar things, which I also find quite 
regularly.

My machines should actually do some useful stuff, like running my Nagios and a 
bunch of nightly builds (CMake, libarchive, things like that). For that, I'd 
like to have the actual system to work. Given the amount of breakage I find 
when doing stabilizations I suspect this is not going to happen. My fear is 
that I'll be rebuilding stuff because there is an upgrade, and then back 
because there was an update, and in between I have to find out what actually 
went wrong. That's close to what I'm doing now, with the difference that the 
main system meanwhile can do it's work because it usually is unaffected, and I 
can decide to ignore the problem for one or another day until I'm bored enough 
to fight the breakage again.

So from my limited PoV this would likely even increase the work that I have to 
do, or the pressure to do it in time to fix the system up to a point where it 
works.

We have already removed many stable packages from hppa, just to reduce the 
amount of work. If sparc really becomes a problem I suspect that dropping most 
of the multimedia or whatever stuff there could also reduce the amount of work 
needed.

Another note: these machines are quite slow, especially the hppa ones, when 
compared with a modern PC with SSD and tons of RAM. I would really _really_ 
welcome it if people could just run tatt for stabilizations on amd64 in a 
regularly empty chroot. It finds tons of stuff with missing dependencies or 
useflags (USE=static is always good for trouble) that I would otherwise run 
into on the slow machines. If you fix only half of the things before it hits 
the minor arches, which is not limited to the above list, it will greatly 
reduce the pain for everyone with a vintage fetish.

So, do what I can't stop you from doing, but at least for me dropping hppa 
will likely not reduce any pain, and if sparc really is a problem than 
dropping some packages will likely do the same thing also. Oh, and maybe mark 
some for fonts and stuff ALLARCHES ;)

Eike (aka Dakon)

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Michał Górny]

On Fri, 2021-10-15 at 23:40 +0200, Rolf Eike Beer wrote:
> We have already removed many stable packages from hppa, just to reduce the 
> amount of work. If sparc really becomes a problem I suspect that dropping most 
> of the multimedia or whatever stuff there could also reduce the amount of work 
> needed.

For the record, I'm not quite sure if dropping large sets of packages to
~arch is actually a good idea.  While it's fine for some leaf packages,
the Python packages have proven to grow new dependencies quite fast.
In the end, dropping stable keywords may result in only having to
reintroduce them soon afterwards, with lots of extra work.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[William Hubbs]

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On Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 03:40:02PM +0200, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> 
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it 
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of 
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of 
> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>   - hppa,
>   - ppc,
>   - sparc,
>   - x86
> to ~arch-only status.
> 
> Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those arches 
> altogether.
> 
> There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
>   - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either aren't 
> really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for 
> the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)
>   - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in 
> case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently, 
> stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
>   - feedback we receive, e.g. by Bugzilla, suggests that Gentoo on at 
> least some of these arches have got very, very few users
>   - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last 
> several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free 
> these days
> 
> WDYT?

For the record, I'm fine with this.

x86 being on the list sort of caught my attention, but it does seem to
fall into the superceeded category, so it should be fine.

Even though running ~arch may be mostly trouble-free, this isn't really
relevant to the discussion imo. If you run ~arch, you should be prepared
for possible breakage at any time and be able to recover from it.

William

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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On 2021-10-14 15:40, Marek Szuba wrote:
> WDYT?

Could you please elaborate what you are expecting from this change?

I.e. will this solve any problem (please name it)? Will it allow us to 
move forward where we are blocked at the moment (please name it)?

I am really curious what you are going to expect to change by this 
keyword change and why you want to change current status at all 
(motivation).


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
fpr: C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Sam James]

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> On 14 Oct 2021, at 14:40, Marek Szuba <marecki@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear everyone,
> 
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
> - hppa,
> - ppc,
> - sparc,
> - x86
> to ~arch-only status.

I'm not sure we should go down this route. Dakon's email covers a lot of the reasons, but I'll try to add to it my own rationale too:

- Most failures found via arch testing _aren't_ arch-specific, but they serve as a useful quality check. That is,
usually, we're not held back by some odd e.g. SIGBUS that nobody knows how to fix.

- We're not really helping users by making such a change. Any problems which prevent stabilisation still exist. We're
just reducing the quality of the Gentoo experience for users on these arches.

My suggested actions:

- As referenced below, make more developers aware they're welcome to have access to our various exotic
hardware!

- Encourage developers to run test suites on their packages. This is a modern part of Gentoo development
and isn't optional if a package has a functioning test suite which isn't hell to get running - i.e. you should really
_try_.

- Further, encouraging tatt/pkg-testing-tools like Dakon suggested before pushing new ebuilds. A wiki page
I've started might prove helpful too: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sam/Useful_scripts#Testing.

- We drop any large suites of packages at least to ~arch where they're problematic. A good place
to start would probably be scientific stuff which isn't a test dependency (or likely to become one)
in future of e.g. the Python stack. There's quite a few niche sci applications stable on e.g. x86
which probably don't have a need to be.

The gist being, I think we can focus our efforts (and try educate + encourage others to help)
without completely shutting the door here.

I'm quite happy helping with these arches right now (although hppa is problematic
due to the speed of our current hardware, we are wondering if we can get some
other kit) as long as we all continue to chip in. But more help is very welcome and desired.

What would probably help more than anything else right now is dropping stable keywords
for irrelevant packages (not wasting time on some stablereqs where nobody is probably
using that $application on $arch) and having a tool to easily report bugs so I don't waste time
copying/pasting logs.

(slyfox actually mentioned his desire for such a tool in his farewell post: https://trofi.github.io/posts/226-farewell-gentoo-dev.html).

Now, addressing the rest of the email:

> Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those arches altogether.
> 
> There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
> - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either aren't really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)

But users of this hardware can only really get by on Gentoo without super-super-frequent updates. Not all versions added to ~arch to get stabilised and also once stabled are less likely
to have e.g. build failures so less wasted time.

> - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently, stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve

I think a better way of tackling this is to make developers aware they can even access a lot of this hardware! I don't think
many developers realise they're welcome to have access to our various arch testing machines -- they're not just
for a select few. We want more help!

> [snip]

best,
sam


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Sam James]

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> On 18 Oct 2021, at 01:50, Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 14 Oct 2021, at 14:40, Marek Szuba <marecki@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear everyone,
>> 
>> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>> - hppa,
>> - ppc,
>> - sparc,
>> - x86
>> to ~arch-only status.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> My suggested actions:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> - We drop any large suites of packages at least to ~arch where they're problematic. A good place
> to start would probably be scientific stuff which isn't a test dependency (or likely to become one)
> in future of e.g. the Python stack. There's quite a few niche sci applications stable on e.g. x86
> which probably don't have a need to be.
> 

One more while it's in my head:

- Try break the assumption in developers' heads (mine too!) that we should stable
x86 while we're stabling amd64 and so on, if it's not already stable there. Try
reduce growing the x86 stable base unless somebody wants it.

>> [snip]
> 
> best,
> sam
> 


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[John Helmert III]

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On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 02:25:47AM +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> On 2021-10-14 15:40, Marek Szuba wrote:
> > WDYT?
>
> Could you please elaborate what you are expecting from this change?
>
> I.e. will this solve any problem (please name it)? Will it allow us to
> move forward where we are blocked at the moment (please name it)?

A security bug, for example, is currently blocked for almost a month
waiting for hppa stabilization [1], and this isn't the first time
we've had to wait for a "slower" arch on a security bug.

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/795480

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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On 2021-10-18 03:08, John Helmert III wrote:
> A security bug, for example, is currently blocked for almost a month
> waiting for hppa stabilization [1], and this isn't the first time
> we've had to wait for a "slower" arch on a security bug.

Excuse me? How is this possible?

We have that Gentoo Vulnerability Treatment Policy and HPPA isn't listed 
in supported architectures. That problem was resolved in 2018 [1].


[1] 
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-announce/message/196e45cde209d1ed25bd42e679739cf5


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
fpr: C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 2021-10-18 at 17:09 +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> On 2021-10-18 03:08, John Helmert III wrote:
> > A security bug, for example, is currently blocked for almost a month
> > waiting for hppa stabilization [1], and this isn't the first time
> > we've had to wait for a "slower" arch on a security bug.
> 
> Excuse me? How is this possible?
> 
> We have that Gentoo Vulnerability Treatment Policy and HPPA isn't listed 
> in supported architectures. That problem was resolved in 2018 [1].
> 

Security team arbitrarily deciding that an architecture is unsupported
while otherwise it's supported in Gentoo doesn't change anything.  Sure,
you can close bugs and pretend that a problem doesn't exist... except
that you can't if you can't remove the old version because of keywords.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Rolf Eike Beer]

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Am Montag, 18. Oktober 2021, 03:08:52 CEST schrieb John Helmert III:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 02:25:47AM +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> > On 2021-10-14 15:40, Marek Szuba wrote:
> > > WDYT?
> > 
> > Could you please elaborate what you are expecting from this change?
> > 
> > I.e. will this solve any problem (please name it)? Will it allow us to
> > move forward where we are blocked at the moment (please name it)?
> 
> A security bug, for example, is currently blocked for almost a month
> waiting for hppa stabilization [1], and this isn't the first time
> we've had to wait for a "slower" arch on a security bug.

I had a system outage of my machine that I run the stabilizations on a few 
weeks back, and then the bug actually slipped through. Which is no excuse, 
but…

-get access to hake (the hppa dev machine) and help doing it. This could fail 
if the machine is trying to build a stage or so, which takes multiple days…

-if you feel that something is missing come over to #gentoo-hppa and ping us 
about that

I'm running libgcrypt tests right now, should hopefully be done until 
tomorrow.

Eike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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On 2021-10-18 19:07, Michał Górny wrote:
> Security team arbitrarily deciding that an architecture is 
> unsupported while otherwise it's supported in Gentoo doesn't change 
> anything.  Sure, you can close bugs and pretend that a problem 
> doesn't exist... except that you can't if you can't remove the old 
> version because of keywords.

You won't see me defending the idea of allowing stable architectures
without security support (this was before I joined Gentoo and I never
liked it). But this is what we have for more than 10 years now.

However, this was never an arbitrary decision. It was something between
arch teams and security project but in the end it was always the arch
team's decision because they are the ones doing the work (like "Sorry, 
we cannot keep up..." -"Well, that's bad but now we have to deal with 
that").

Anyway, I think we are losing focus on topic. I am still waiting for 
Marecki to answer the motivation behind this. And to quote you:

> Sure, you can close bugs and pretend that a problem doesn't exist

Sadly, you can say the same for dropping stable keywords (and I think we 
are not that far away if I understand [1] correctly), not? That's why I 
asked for the motivation behind this and what people are expecting to 
become better/what problem will be solved after that change.

We haven't yet talked about the risk of broken deptrees because some 
tooling will ignore non-stable architectures by default.


[1] 
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/a3c7a6cb7596a5ff9102e4d819a52d9c


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
fpr: C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Marek Szuba]

Sorry about a long delay responding, I ended up being offline until the 
end of last week and I've had quite a lot of catching up.

Anyway, let me begin by addressing a sentiment expressed independently 
in several responses and which could be summarised as "just come and 
help". A laudable idea in theory - except as a project run entirely by 
unpaid volunteers, we can neither hire more people nor demand that 
developers work on more things than they already do. It might sound 
harsh but if working in particle physics (which like most public-sector 
research suffers from chronic shortage of manpower comparing to the 
amount of things to do, and which is nowadays based primarily on 
large-scale collaborations whose leadership has only minimal authority 
over individual participants) has taught me anything, it's that it is 
better to do a good job at two things than a mediocre one at ten.

Moving on to specific comments:


On 18/10/2021 01:50, Sam James wrote:

 > - Most failures found via arch testing _aren't_ arch-specific, but 
they serve as a useful quality check. That is,
 > usually, we're not held back by some odd e.g. SIGBUS that nobody 
knows how to fix.

Possibly true (I've got no evidence to make a definite statement either 
way) - but there is a point in testing, or in pretty much any technical 
activity, when the amount of work required to polish something further 
begins to strongly outweigh the benefits.

Moreover, the above doesn't really sound to me like a case in defence of 
stabilisation on exotic arches; quite the opposite in fact.

 > - Encourage developers to run test suites on their packages. This is 
a modern part of Gentoo development
 > and isn't optional if a package has a functioning test suite which 
isn't hell to get running - i.e. you should really
 > _try_.

People who do not do this yet should be taken behind the chemicals shed 
and sho... I mean, be very much ashamed of themselves. Not sure what 
that has got to do with arch testing though, given what kind of hardware 
most of us do Gentoo development on.

 > - We drop any large suites of packages at least to ~arch where 
they're problematic.

In addition to the dependency-creep problem already mentioned by Michał, 
I am not convinced that arbitrarily declaring some package or other not 
worthy of stable status on arch X would make the user experience on this 
arch better than downgrading the whole arch to ~X. Furthermore, I am 
pretty sure arch testers would then have to keep track of which packages 
must not be stabilised where - meaning more work.

On 18/10/2021 01:25, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:

> Could you please elaborate what you are expecting from this change?
> 
> I.e. will this solve any problem (please name it)? Will it allow us to 
> move forward where we are blocked at the moment (please name it)?

One part of this has already been mentioned by the others, i.e. all too 
often low activity on these arches ends up delaying overall progress of 
things such security issues for ALL Gentoo users.

Another is that IMHO there are way too few people active in these arch 
teams to keep up with the work load - even including sam's activity 
pretty much all over the place, which at this rate I fear will result in 
him burning out soon, things are far from great.

On 15/10/2021 22:40, Rolf Eike Beer wrote:

 > My machines should actually do some useful stuff, like running my 
Nagios and a
 > bunch of nightly builds (CMake, libarchive, things like that). For 
that, I'd
 > like to have the actual system to work. Given the amount of breakage 
I find
 > when doing stabilizations I suspect this is not going to happen.

Maybe, maybe not... If my experience with RISC-V keywording is anything 
to go by, a lot of breakage comes from unexpected interactions due to 
throwing everything but a kitchen sink on a single system - which having 
to deal with stabilisation makes more likely, especially on an arch 
which does not see many new keywording requests (on riscv, which is 
still quite active in this respect, I simply run all keywording tests 
with --oneshot and regularly distclean the system).


On 14/10/2021 18:10, Michał Górny wrote:

 > While we're discussing it, maybe we should start by defining a clear
 > criteria for platform support tiers?  Like: what are the requirements
 > for a platform to maintain stable keywords?  Then the decisions could
 > look less arbitrary, and people would have a clear way of knowing what
 > they need to do if they wish the platform to continue having stable
 > keywords.

Not a bad idea but I wonder how much effort we might want to throw at 
this, especially given we're not Red Hat or SUSE.

-- 
MS

Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[Rolf Eike Beer]

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> My machines should actually do some useful stuff, like running my Nagios and
> a bunch of nightly builds (CMake, libarchive, things like that). For that,
> I'd like to have the actual system to work. Given the amount of breakage I
> find when doing stabilizations I suspect this is not going to happen.

Just to make that slightly more clear: the keywordings and stabilizations 
happen in their own chroots. But the main install of the system is what I like 
to have really working.

Eike

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