[gentoo-dev] Local workarounds with no reported bugs

[Michał Górny]

Hello, everyone.

I'd like to point out a major problem in Gentoo: there's a fair number
of developers who add various local workarounds to problems they meet
and don't bother to report a bug. Worst than that, this applies not
only for upstream problems but also to Gentoo eclass/ebuild-related
issues.


Example: udev people had problems with MULTILIB_WRAPPED_HEADERS
in the past. Instead of contacting me (which would result in helpful
explanation how to do things properly), they abused bash to disable
the check function implicitly in the ebuilds.

Nobody bothered to inform me of the issue there. Instead, I had to
notice it looking at the udev ebuilds accidentally. Furthermore, in
most of the ebuilds the workaround was no longer necessary but nobody
bothered to check that.


Example 2: Coacher had problem with git-r3 not trying fallback URIs
when earlier URI was https and https wasn't supported in git. So he
reordered URIs to have https last. With tiny explanation in some random
commit message.

So we have a problem that affects around a half of git-r3 packages
(using quick grep, results inaccurate), however minor it is. Worse, it
affects the policy of preferring https and causes some people to reject
the policy silently. And nobody gives a damn to report it!


Therefore, I'd like to request establishing an official policy against
workarounds with no associated bug reports.

Your thoughts?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>