Re: [gentoo-dev] Maintainer needed: dev-libs/icu

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 29/10/2012 11:10, Rich Freeman wrote:
> While I do agree in principle, I think that talking about going to
> devrel over "minor inconsistencies" is over-the-top.

It's not about the inconsistencies, it's about the excuse. If the
maintainer owns up to the mistake, that's fine by me, shit happens and
so on. If the maintainer tries to cover behind "I'm just proxying", then
I'll be pissed.

> I'll take a package that has a mistake twice a year over a package
> that isn't in the tree at all any day.

That's fine if it's a fringe package or one that wouldn't get to the
tree otherwise — I agree with the spirit and methods. It's _not_ fine
for a package that, yes, only has 50 dependencies, but every time it
breaks everything goes KO.

> It seems like many of the ICU issues are upstream-related.  If your
> library breaks on every release then somebody clearly doesn't
> understand the purpose of sonames.  That puts anybody maintaining the
> package at a distro level in a really bad position.

The problem with ICU is worse than you expect. For once, with version
50, it changes ABI (but not soname as far as I can tell) depending on
which compiler you build it with. Yes, this is pretty much fucked up.

> I think what is most needed here is a maintainer that can just
> coordinate with the various downstream projects.  I don't care as much
> whether ICU is perfectly consistent as long as projects like chromium
> have a chance to test things out and catch issues before they hit the
> tree.  That is actually part of the job of a proxy maintainer.

Agreed. At the same time, we should have learnt that Arfrever is unable
to take up that job, given the repeated issues we've been having with
almost everything he maintained. Which is why we need to find someone else.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@×××××××××.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/