"Chris Bainbridge" <chris.bainbridge@...> posted
623652d50607270200h14bae69ai360777afc3d725ae@..., excerpted
below, on  Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:00:39 +0100:

> The testing is supposed to be for the ebuild, not the package itself,
> so there's not much point in holding back packages with simple ebuilds
> from being stabilised.

While ~arch is supposed to be stable upstream, testing the ebuild, in
practice there's more to it than that.  "Ebuild" in this case is shorthand
for "Gentoo aspects of a package, including not only the ebuild script,
but how the build process functions and the interaction with the various
available Gentoo gcc/glibc/binutils/etc packages, and how it runs in a
Gentoo system, including not only file system layout, but how it actually
runs against the various current Gentoo versions of all its dependencies.

In fact, a specifically enumerated part of an arch-tester's job is to test
not only build-time success, but that it actually runs reasonably well
also.  While an arch-tester can't be expected to always be familiar enough
with the app to test all the little corner cases, when they say it's ready
to stabilize, they are in effect reporting that it not only compiled, but
ran "as advertised" with no glaring issues or instabilities thru a
reasonable test of its runtime functionality as well, such that it should
be safe to keyword stable, and therefore be available to those that
actually depend on the app for "mission critical" functionality (whether
that mission is as a public server, or blasting the other team in an online
frag-fest).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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