2011/10/3 Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@g.o>:
> I asked for authoritative documentation which forbids downgrades several
> times, but got only vague references (and "common sense") as reply.
>

While I'm all for documenting QA policies, ultimately common sense
does need to prevail.  As I've commented before we can't always let a
lack of defined rules keep us from doing the smart thing - or we'll
just turn into a distro ruled by lawyers.  There has to be a balance.

At this point I think this is another tempest in a teapot - the
package shouldn't have been removed yet, and we should try to avoid
removing packages pre-maturely in the future.  That said, having been
removed it doesn't make sense to re-add it until it is fixed, and the
maintainer has agreed to this (grudgingly, and I can understand that).
 As much as it is common sense to not put back a now-broken package,
it also wasn't common sense to pull it out with only two week's notice
in the first place, and as far as I can tell without any effort to
contact the maintainer (not that I'd be aware if an attempt was made).
 It seems likely to me that on a distro the size of Gentoo things like
this can happen without any real malicious intent, and we just need to
learn from our mistakes...

Rich