Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: stabilization policies

[Tom Wijsman]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:19:10 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:

> All,
>
> I'm not really sure what the answer to this problem is, so I want to
> know what the group thinks about how we can handle it.
>
> During the last release of OpenRC, I learned that people *do* run
> production servers on ~arch.

While I don't, and asked it just because of the large amount; it
appears from some things lately, and not just OpenRC, that there is a
certain group that regards ~arch as some kind of new stable.

This isn't solely about versions entering ~arch, but also about
versions leaving ~arch; as ~ is for testing, people should expect their
version to break and they should also expect that they cannot rely on a
version remaining in the Portage tree, that's just wrong...

As a result, there are complaints regarding ~; while really, we should
have more complaints regarding stable instead. From the forums I see
more and more people switching to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="arch ~arch"; so, we
are getting close to a point where stable becomes less important.

This is really not the direction we should be heading...

> I asked about it and was told that the
> reason for this is bitrot in the stable tree.

Let me dig up an example...

Our last sys-kernel/gentoo-sources stabilization was 3 months ago:

  15 May 2013; Agostino Sarubbo <ago@g.o>
  gentoo-sources-3.8.13.ebuild: Stable for amd64, wrt bug #469508

This is in my opinion bitrot; and it emphasizes where the problem lies,
the arch teams simply don't have enough resources to keep up with the
stabilization that we would like to see, more than once a month. We
should crowd source testing in one way or the other; that way, we get
feedback from a larger share of users, instead of overloading 'ago'...

3.9.11-r1 was blocked (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477976)
for something that shouldn't even be problematic and 3.10.7 is filed
(https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481522) which I am waiting
for but it seems to take some time; so, I hope we get a stabilized
kernel this time, because otherwise we might as well drop keywords...

Besides the latest stable branch, it would be nice to have stable LTS;
that is Long Term Stable, thus the older 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4 branches.

> My question is, how can we improve our stabilization
> procedures/policies so we can convince people not to run production
> servers on ~arch and keep the stable tree more up to date?

As I hinted at above; I think we really need to make it less strict and
crowd source the efforts to the users, as the strictness as well as the
limited resources slow things down a lot.

This also makes perfect sense; we are providing ~ as a means for the
users to test, but how do the users report back "success" (or failures)?

Even for failures, I often discover that a lot of users do not file
bugs; or they do file bugs, but in the wrong place (forums, FB, G+,
chat, ...) and we don't discover them in time. Those that I catch I
refer them to https://bugs.gentoo.org; but well, I can't catch them all.

It is due to the lack of such feedback that we have a too huge need
from the arch teams; if we can get more feedback, we would not have to
rely so much to the arch teams and assign them to what really needs
proper testing. For example: @system packages, popular packages, ...

Some attention on where we spend our resources as well as how much
delay there is for some packages need to be considered; otherwise we're
just wasting time on stabilizing very small and unimportant packages.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
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