[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Reworking package stabilization policies

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Brian Harring posted on Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:34:43 -0700 as excerpted:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 07:31:10PM +1300, Alistair Bush wrote:
>> > On Saturday 27 of March 2010 21:58:41 William Hubbs wrote:
>> > 
>> > It's really freaking silly to wait months for stabilization of some
>> > random php/perl library that's known to work.
>> 
>> Have you ever just considered closing the stabilization bug and
>> ignoring the arch.  If they take so long to mark your packages as
>> stable why do you care about them enough to even attempt to stabilize
>> anything on their arch.
> 
> If the pkg isn't a leaf node, you wind up keeping older and older
> versions lingering across multiple pkgs to keep it from breaking stable.
> 
> This is assuming that it's still heavily frowned upon to remove the only
> stable version available for a non-dead arch... ~harring

What I've seen maintainers (report) doing before, when they give up on a(n 
non-experimental) arch, is keep the last stable version for that arch 
around, but remove all other keywords, and reassign all bugs for that 
version to the arch in question, with a (perhaps boilerplate) comment on 
the bug to the effect that said arch refuses to stabilize any further, 
thus the only reason said version remains in the tree, so the bug is 
theirs to deal with or not deal with as they choose.

I've always wondered what happened to such bugs after that, but never 
enough to actually go find some to see...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman