[gentoo-dev] Re: Slacker arches

[Ryan Hill]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:38:03 +0100
Tomáš Chvátal <scarabeus@g.o> wrote:

> Every arch teams should stabilise OR write out reason why they can't do
> so to stable bug in 90 days. If any arch team fails to do so the
> maintainer can decide to drop their keywords to testing. Given depgraph
> breakages the maintainer can coordinate with the QA team to drop all
> reverse dependencies to testing too.

Won't this just pile on more work on already stressed to the max arch teams?
As in, now they have to stabilize more packages to get back to where they
were in the first place?

And as I understand it, the reason maintainers are complaining is because
they want to drop old versions.  Meaning stable users of these archs can
suddenly lose large parts of the tree if this happens.  From their point of
view, we've just broken perfectly working systems.  That's pretty much the
opposite of what stable is supposed to promise.  And I've never been an arch
tester, but I bet after the first few times I tested a package only to have it
dropped to ~arch because no developer was around to commit the keyword
change, I wouldn't feel much like doing it anymore.

How about the opposite?  If everyone but $arch has stabilized the package,
and you can't get a response from them in a reasonable time, then use your
discretion as maintainer and mark it stable yourself.  This isn't ideal, and
it could cause something to break for stable users now and then, but it's
better than the guaranteed breakage of just dropping the stable keyword for
it and its dependencies.  Arch testers would remain useful by giving the
maintainer some measure of assurance that they won't accidently break
anything for that arch.


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