Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: stabilization policies

[Alan McKinnon]

On 20/08/2013 22:25, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 22:00:52 +0200
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:
>
>> As a long time user and citizen of -user I can tell you what the
>> general feeling of arch vs ~arch there is:
>
> Thanks for jumping into the discussion.
>
>> arch has plenty old stuff in it
>
> Yes, it keeps me from using it; I would have to unmask too much...
>
>> ~arch is plenty good enough for everything except very mission
>> critical stuff
>>
>> ~arch does not break every other day, and breakage is actually
>> surprisingly rare. And, it's usually confined to
>> openrc/udev/systemd/baselayout and other critical packages where one
>> just knows upfront anyway that danger may lurk ahead.
>>
>> Some folks like me sync daily and accept that I deal with occasional
>> breakage maybe once a month. Usually I just mask an offending package
>> and move on. Others wait a few days and if no reported bugs, then
>> emerge it.
>
> This really sounds like what would be the description of stable; I
> mean, for mission critical stuff someone would plan out a migration and
> "test" the upgrade prior to applying it to the server. For the rest,
> except for maybe that critical packages shouldn't break; an issue once
> a month is something that slips through, eg. see the stable bugs...
>
>> I get the sense that hard masked and -9999 is the new testing,
>
> Actually, hard masked is usually something that is really broken; while
> there are some things masked for some other reasons, you can't really
> regard it as testing. But yeah, as for -9999, it could be considered
> testing; although it is often broken, because of broken patches, ...
>
>> I also get the sense that arch progresses too slowly for many people.
>
> +1 that's one of the points that came up on IRC; 30 days and more
> being too long, because not everyone follows up with that time
> schedule (we are people, not cronjobs), it even gets a bit longer...
>
>> How long did we wait for MySQL-5.5 to reach arch? Folk wanted that
>> one in stable reasonably early and mixing arch/~arch is very very bad
>> in real life. Hence the recommendation to switch to ~arch, and it
>> usually works out just fine.
>
> Yes, but we don't want to end up having everyone having mixed trees or
> be on ~arch; if we do, stabilization is going to become a wasted effort.

Perhaps the area to be clarified is "what is the intended risk profile
for arch and ~arch?"

stable and unstable mean very different things to different people, they
are quite overloaded terms, so a proper definition is in order. Then
users can also accurately just what they are going to get in arch as
well as the intended level of stability.

We already have a good beginning with the usual description of ~arch as
"works pretty much OK most of the time but new ebuilds go in here first
so expect some breakage sometimes". Let's express that in terms of risk.

Something else we should also keep in mind - binary distros often
recommend that autoupdates be enabled. If people do this it changes the
game play as they really don't know what is coming down the wire at all.
Gentoo is different - nothing changes until you sync and emerge world
and this really does require that the sysadmin eyeballs the output. This
removes a lot of the risk from the devs (you can't really know what my
USE will do on my end so I must assume some responsibility for my
choices). I do believe this gives the devs a lot of wiggle room to get
things into arch quicker without having to test and verify every little
thing.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com