[gentoo-dev] Dropping ia64/ppc/sparc profiles to dev/exp

[David Seifert]

TL;DR
ia64/ppc/sparc teams are pretty much dead. They have been for a long
time and this won't change any time soon. Gentoo should focus its
resources on archs that are important and has the manpower to support.
Let us please drop these 3 archs to dev profiles to ease maintenance.

Dear all,
I'd like to request Council to consider my motion to drop the
ia64/ppc/sparc profiles to dev (or exp). These arches are pretty much
dead, minus the automated workflows of ago. Two months ago I have
written to these 3 archs, and only received one reply from ppc agreeing
with my sentiment, with no response from ia64 or sparc, which in itself
is pretty telling.

Currently, architecture projects think adding their keywords is a
right, which I strongly disagree with. I believe being able to add (and
stable) your keywords is a privilege - namely it carries with it the
duty to react to keywording and stabilization requests in a timely
manner. Let's compare the state of ia64/ppc/sparc to, say alpha:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605278

alpha was keyworded within 6 hours. To date ia64/ppc/sparc are still
not keyworded (the bot had some breakages due to jer again shifting
around all the bugs). Within 4 months these arches have not managed to
keyword those 4 packages. This is I believe the most striking example
of how the only work done for these archs are ago's automated stablereq
scripts. Why do I saw that keywording+stabling your arch is a
privilege? Maintenance of packages is hampered by archs not stabling,
because we cannot clean up broken packages. Adding keywords is a two-
way street - if you don't act speedily, you're breaking part of the
maintainer-arch social contract.

Please don't turn this into a massive bikeshedding contest and just
admit that it is extremely unlikely that these archs will see more
activity in the near future. We should focus our resources on more
important archs (arm64 maybe?) instead of these. I know you have that
old Mac G4 or UltraSPARC sitting in your closet that you're 2 days away
from installing Gentoo on, but the pain for maintainers and the rest of
the community is just too great. If someone steps up to do the work, we
can then move archs back to a stable profile, but so long as they
linger in their present state, let's call a spade a spade.

Anyhow, I formally request the Council to vote on dropping these archs
to unstable/exp profiles for the next Council meeting, explicitly
overriding any arch concerns that are likely to awake now and going to
be running around like headless chicken.

David