Re: [gentoo-dev] proposed solution to arches/stable problem

[Aron Griffis]

Travis Tilley wrote:	[Tue Jun 22 2004, 09:05:46AM EDT]
> On Tuesday 22 June 2004 10:44 am, Aron Griffis wrote:
> >     1. Repoman could check keyword changes, warning arch maintainers
> >        when they mark a version arch-stable that is not marked stable
> >        by the maintainer.
>
> actually, i'd love to have something that's repoman-activated. that would also
> be a great slap on the wrist reminder any time i'm tempted to do otherwise
> without first talking to the herd maintainers. ^^;

*grin*

Yep, it can also show up in Mr_Bones_ daily full-tree repoman scan,
and would be a good candidate for aliz's report.  It would be easy to
see if there's a particular arch team that seems to be overstepping
itself.  At the very least it would be a useful statistic.

> i'd prefer a different variation.. perhaps a "known issues exist" or "beware
> of dragons" flag of some sort.

Ciaran mentioned the same idea on IRC:

    <@ciaranm> agriffis: i'd prefer a donotmarkthisstable keyword,
    personally, and i'd rather that it wasn't a keyword

    (Since Ciaran has been so kind as to help me with my misuse of the 
    English language, I'll point out that he should have used "weren't"
    instead of "wasn't" to indicate the conditional tense.  ;-)

I understand the desire for that sort of flag from the perspective of
an arch developer, but I'm very wary of it.  Here are the reasons:

    1. The lack of such a flag in a given ebuild would appear to be a
       green light to arch teams, but in reality it might simply be
       that the package maintainer hasn't updated their ebuild yet to
       contain the "beware" flag.

    2. Package maintainers then have the responsibility to add the
       "beware" flag whenever they receive notification of a bug
       against the package.  That's a lot of busy-work.

    3. The "beware" flag would undoubtedly sit in the ebuild even
       after the problem is resolved.  As a package maintainer I can't
       imagine having to toggle it on-and-off as problems come up and
       are solved.

    4. In reality, the package maintainer's arch *should* already
       contain that information, shouldn't it?  If it is marked ~arch,
       then it *should* mean the same thing as a "beware" flag.

I realize that #4 isn't always the case, but consider for a minute
what is the problem and what is the symptom....  If a package
languishes in ~arch for a long time, that is a symptom of the fact
that it is poorly maintained.  If we were to add a "beware" flag to
teh system, then it would not be well-maintained either!

> but any useful variation of this theme that's
> repoman activated would be nice. *shrug* foser's idea of having an ebuild
> mention the maintainer's arch(s) would probably also work if repoman knows
> about it... but there are a lot of semi-but-not-really maintained ebuilds.

Yes.  The "semi-but-not-really maintained ebuilds" isn't something we
can really fix as part of the arch-vs-stable discussion,
unfortunately.  It's something that is on the gradual road of being
fixed via herds, teams, and recruitment of responsible developers.

> just to clarify: i dont think this is something to prevent archs from
> determining special cases as needed, just something to force some extra
> thinking and remind arch maintainers that there are probably extra steps
> involved that should be taken first.

Agreed!  One such step would be attempting to communicate with the
package maintainer about the problem, if possible before making an
arch keyword change.  I think we all agree on this.

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer