Re: [gentoo-dev] Is there a process for marking ebuilds stable?

[Mikael Andersson]

On Monday 14 April 2003 11.04, Fredrik Jagenheim wrote:
>
> However, a successful emerge is only one of the critieria for an
> unstable package to move to stable. It not crashing runtime is
> another...
>
> Actually, the more I think of it, the whole point is moot...
> stable.gentoo.org might be a good idea, but why not replace it with
> stats.gentoo.org? If I submit a stat report which tells me that I have
> the latest version of a package installed, you could assume that it
> works for me. If not, I'd post a bugreport. And if I couldn't be arsed
> to set up gentoo-stats and post bugs about things that doesn't work,
> why would I use stable.gentoo.org anyway?
>
I don't think stable.gentoo.org is not a good solution since it's too much
manual work included from a user for (apparently nothing) in return.

I think the most efficient way to mark packages stable is statistics based.

If you compare number of installations of a  package against number of bugs
filed and their severity i think you should get pretty decent stability 
figures for most packages. The exception to this is packages with few users
but the users of such packages is probably more interested in 'voting' for 
their packages.

This is only an initial suggestion, please comment and improve :)

1) Successful Emerges/Bugs
  a) Count package downloads and bugs filed. If no blocker/critical bugs 
exists after a week or two mark as stable. For important packages this rule
could be made more stringent.
  b) Count real merges/unmerges of packages and not only package downloads, 
this should to opt-in since it would in some way need to post information 
back to gentoo.org

2) Voting console
A console application which finds all stable packages installed more than
a week or two ago and asks you to determine how much you've used them.
As default it only needs to show packages with few users since simple 
statistics should be enough to validate packages with many users. At the
end of the emerge remind a user of 'unpopular' packages to run the voting
console to mark as stable.

> Please, don't see this as an attack on stable.gentoo.org, just trying
> to see it in another perspective... And I probably missed something in
> that generalization...
>
> > Sorry for this rather long a quite unfocussed post, mid-term exams are
> > on the horizon again so I maybe should just shut up and grab my books...
>
> Exams are important, but so is gentoo. ;)
>
+1

> //H


/Mikael Andersson

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