Re: [gentoo-dev] Do (old-ish) Portage QA checks comprise policy?

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 11/4/19 10:01 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> TL;DR: If a QA check is enforced by Portage for a reasonably long time,
> does it constitute policy?  Or can it be changed unilaterally by Portage
> team?
> 

To avoid these sorts of questions in the future, it might be worth the 
time it would take to vote on each of these policies formally, document 
them on the wiki, and then move the related checks to ::gentoo/metadata 
where other package managers can benefit from them (and where they can't 
be unilaterally nuked). Having a comprehensive list of policies will 
also help developers who want to Do The Right Thing and who read up on 
these things proactively.

In this case, whether or not this is "policy" is beside the point. No 
one else wants to remove this check because it's useful and prevents 
developers from accidentally dumping garbage onto users' (often limited) 
root filesystems. Some people don't like to do their jobs, though, and 
for those developers it's a lot easier to delete the check and make 
things worse for everybody than it would be to package software 
correctly. Just Say No. That's what QA is for. But again, it would be 
easier to veto these obviously-stupid things if they've been documented.