Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for late/slow stabilizations

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:01:13 +0100
Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> Please explain me why keeping foobar-1.0 ( Released in 10/12/2009 ) is
> in favor of a ppc64 stable user when amd64/x86 has foobar-2.1.3 (
> Released 60 days ago ) already stabled for them

Because it's known to work. That's the point of stable.

> What if a foobar-1.0 bug pops up? What kind of support will that user
> get from the gentoo or upstream maintainer. The most frequent answer
> would be "Please update to 2.1.3. 1.0 is 0ld". Yes, not droppping the
> keywords is convenient for users but in this case their stable tree
> gets obsolet and unsupported

When that happens, *then* stabling foobar can become a priority, and
the user in question can help with it. However, given the finite amount
of development time available, you need to bear in mind that foobar is
nowhere near as special as you'd like to think, that Debian is still
running foobar 0.0.1, and that something that is known to work is, for
many users, better than something that might work.

Which, again, is the point: to what extent do you care about users? If
you're prepared to tell users to expect annoying breakages that take a
lot of work to fix as things get keyworded every now and again because
it makes things marginally easier for developers, then go ahead and
unkeyword a package plus lots of deps. If you think users are the
distribution's primary asset, however, then it's worth inconveniencing
yourselves slightly every now and again to save them a lot of pain.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh