Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: reduce conflicts, separate keywording from ebuilds

[Bryan Østergaard]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 10:54:55AM +0100, Stefan Schweizer wrote:
> To my fellow arguing Gentoo developers,
>
> due to the recent conflict concerning keywording I want to propose to
> separate keywording completely from ebuilds. The keywords would reside
> in a special file in profiles/, maybe even in more than one file to
> allow more granular permissions. For example only mips developers can
> access
> the mips keywording file then.
>
> The arch team can then decide themselves which ebuild they want to mark
> ~arch and they can take care of possible new dependencies themselves.
>
> Also currently kde keywording/stabling needs ~300 commits. The problem
> being that all changes files also get transferred in a rsync. A separate
> keywording file would be the only one changed thus greatly reducing the
> sync time.
>
That's lame for several  different reasons that I'm going to outline
below and frankly anybody blowing steam about ~arch keywording the
latest version (which ended up as being the goal yesterday) is being
extremely silly.

Anyway, here's several reasons why it's lame - I'm sure there's even
more good reasons but these should suffer:

A. ~arch keywords are supposed to be carried over to new versions unless
we're talking about big rewrites or similar (so old versions doesn't
have to linger around in portage tree at all).

B. If we're complaining about MIPS team not being able to ~mips kde-meta
on time we need to remove all the arch teams that falls behind from
time. I think that leaves us with maybe x86, amd64, sparc as *the only*
arch teams allowed to keyword kde-meta which is completely insane and an
insult to our users.

C. If (as Diego told me) portage is being too slow regenerating cache
because of an extra 300 kde-meta ebuilds in the tree we have to sane
options:

- C1. Remove kde-meta completely as it's breaking our package manager.

- C2. Fix portage immediately or switch to a package manager that works.

Now, all of the above is insane as I think everybody can agree so please
stop making a big fuss about this. An extra 300 kde-meta ebuilds
shouldn't:

D. Be in the tree at all unless KDE team thinks it's fun to drop all the
~arch keywords.

E. Be a problem for the package manager (or we got bigger problems on
our hand which would basically force us to stop adding new packages to
the tree until resolved).

Besides that splitting keywords out from ebuilds doesn't solve
*anything* at all related to this as the ebuilds *still* have to stay
around as long as they have keywords. Just like current policy says.
Moving metadata to another place doesn't change that at all.

Regards,
Bryan Østergaard
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