Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: stabilization policies

On 8/20/13 11:19 AM, William Hubbs wrote:
> During the last release of OpenRC, I learned that people *do* run
> production servers on ~arch. I asked about it and was told that the
> reason for this is bitrot in the stable tree.

People frequently point to lack of manpower as reason for this, but I
don't think it's true.

First, the rate arch teams (at least mainstream, amd64/x86) deal with
stabilization queues has improved. I'm not aware of any severe backlogs
in terms of stabilization bugs filed but not handled (on amd64/x86).

Second: people maintain list of packages to unmask, or maintain ~arch
servers... I hope they have some kind of testing/staging environment
before unleashing ~arch on production servers. Well, this is exactly
what stable can be - this effort could easily be shared with the rest of
the community by these people stabilizing things. I'm in favor of policy
changes if needed to make this happen.

Furthermore, it'd be great to have people who actually run servers help
with stabilizations. Arch teams could be doing their best, but they
probably don't run postgres/apache/ruby/whatever in production, and so
it's pretty much if it compiles and reverse dependencies don't explode
it's perfect. People running servers in production can actually test
these pretty thoroughly in staging environment and either vet them with
higher confidence or file good blocking bugs.

Paweł