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

[William Hubbs]

Hi Michael,

On Mon, Nov 04, 2019 at 10:53:44AM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> 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.

I actually agree with you. I am not a fan of un-written things that we
call policies, and if this is going to be a distro policy it definitely
belongs in ::gentoo not in the package manager, but also see my other
reply.

> 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.

This is a whole other thread I've been talking about for years, but if
we want to be concerned about dumping "garbage" on people's limited root
file systems, there are other things we need to re-consider, like our
notion that we have to install small files everywhere even though they
aren't always used.

So, if you want to talk about that, please start a whole new thread.

William