Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of unmaintained packages in Gentoo

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/20/2017 02:41 PM, Virgil Dupras wrote:
>
> Maybe some kind of official overlay for packages needing love? We
> could send outdated packages there to die or to be born again if the
> right person picks it up.
>
> The overlay could have more relaxed rules (not malicious and looking
> good? no need to test this, merge!) for PR merging. If the package
> degrades through bad PRs, fine, let's let it die. If it improves,
> good, it can be born again.
>
> ...
>
> (my apologies if this idea is not new, I haven't been following the
> ML for very long.)

It's not a bad idea, but personally I'd like to see it as a third level
of stability in the tree for users to opt into with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS.
Right now ~arch means,

  * I've built and tested this

and, because of how our package manager works,

  * I think this is more reliable than the previous ~arch version

Often that's a pretty high bar to meet.

For example, we have a pull request open right now[0] that adds an alpha
version of dev-php/xdebug-client to get php-7.2 support. It's probably
fine. The ebuild contains some minor, expected changes. Whatever, it
probably works. But, I don't use xdebug-client, and I don't think the
other member of the PHP team does either. Building php-7.2 takes a
while, and I'd have to do that and figure out how to do a basic "does
this work" test on the package to make sure it doesn't die immediately,
because otherwise the alpha version is going to ruin life for the people
who are using php-7.1 with the existing ~arch version.

But it's probably fine! It would be great if there was a third level of
stability called "whatever, it probably works." Then I could just merge
that PR and let the crazy people who have that in their ACCEPT_KEYWORDS
tell me if it breaks. Instead, it has to wait until one of two people
has the time to test/review it.


[0] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/6586