Re: [gentoo-dev] Please subscribe to travis-ci mail alias to get notifications on depgraph breakages

[Andrew Savchenko]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2015 00:23:29 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello, developers.
>
> We have added a new mail alias travis-ci@g.o and set up travis-ci [1]
> to send notifications on status change there. Please seriously consider
> adding yourself to the alias, and contributing to the quality
> of Gentoo.
>
> The mail load is low -- travis will only send notices when the state
> changes from 'good' to 'bad', and the other way around. However, you
> will need to manually grep the logs provided by travis for occurences
> of 'FATAL'.
>
> Please remember that keeping the repository in a broken state is
> inconvenient both for users and other developers. In particular
> the issues include:
>
> 1. dependency resolution errors blocking @world upgrades,
>
> 2. Portage unnecessarily switching packages to ~arch (and therefore
>    reducing quality of stable systems),
>
> 3. repoman refusing to commit irrelevant changes to packages.
>
> Therefore, whenever possible please try to fix the issues ASAP.
>
> However, if you are not the person directly responsible for
> the dependency graph breakage, please *reliably* inform him
> about the revert/change you're doing. Failing to do has already
> resulted in developers repeating their mistakes because of
> misinformation.
>
> Preferably, always file a bug in such a case and make it block
> the 'broken-depgraph' tracker [2]. When assigning/CC-ing to the bug,
> please make sure to include both the maintainers of the broken package,
> and the maintainers of the dependency as necessary.

While I must admit that travis is a quite convenient tool (thought
it has its limitations), I'd like to raise related software freedom
concern.

Travis itself is a closed, proprietary and non-trivial-to-replace
solution. If travis will become essential for Gentoo development,
it may undermine development freedom and Gentoo social contract,
which states: "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or
metadata unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License, the
GNU Lesser General Public License, the Creative Commons -
Attribution/Share Alike or some other license approved by the Open
Source Initiative (OSI)."

If travis will change their terms of service in future and our
workflow/infra will depends on these checks, whole development
process may be hampered.

So developers should think twice before depending their workflow on
this solution. I'm refusing to sign up to the list which in my
opinion indirectly violates Gentoo social contract.

If some other free tool (preferably deployed on Gentoo
infrastructure) will be used for this task, I'll sign-up right away.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko