Re: [gentoo-dev] New Working Group established to evaluate the stable tree

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 3:12 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 02:33:52PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> I'd rather see maintainers just yank the last stable package and break
>> the depgraph and let the arch teams deal with the cleanup than have
>> them mark stuff stable without any testing at all.  Or build a script
>> that does the keyword cleanup for them.  De-keywording late stable
>> requests is a solution that is self-correcting.  As packages are
>> reduced from the stable set then there are fewer stable requests and
>> the arch team is better able to focus on the ones they deem important.
>> Throwing more packages in stable that aren't actually stable just
>> makes that problem worse, and destroys whatever value the stable
>> keyword had on the arch.  For small arch teams they really should be
>> focusing their time on core packages.
>
> Rich, This was my original thinking about this issue. It turned out to
> be more controversial than I originally thought -- folks told me that
> stable tree users expect stability above all, so breaking the depgraph
> is unacceptable, so I'm just trying to find something that is more
> palletable.
>

Well, I wasn't suggesting that breaking the depgraph is great.  Just
that I think it is better than calling things stable which aren't.

A better approach is a script that does the keyword cleanup.

So, if you want to reap an ebuild you run "destabilize
foo-1.2.ebuild".  It searches the tree for all reverse deps and
removes stable keywords from those.  Then you commit all of that in
one commit.

If you want to be extra nice you stick it in a pull request in github
and point it out to the arch team and ask them if they're sure they
don't want to stabilize your package...  :)

-- 
Rich