Re[2]: [gentoo-dev] tentative x86 arch team glep

[Jakub Moc]

5.9.2005, 22:09:28, Stuart Herbert wrote:

> I kept PHP5 masked for those 14 months, and (as Jakub and others can
> confirm) most of the feedback has been limited to "unmask that
> puppy" (sometimes put in stronger terms ;-)  There were some bugs from
> users who had found issues, but not many.

Well, yeah - and the same goes for e.g. MySQL-4.1; the only thing you get from
p.masking popular packages is a be-weekly bug like "WTH is this still masked,
upstream says it's stable and best version released yet which everyone should
upgrade to" ;p

Real testing from users comes when it goes to ~arch, then they start screaming
"hell, it broke my box, why isn't this p.masked, it's so buggy!" :)

So, unless we have a *lot more* devs to do thorough testing of p.masked ebuilds
(totally unfeasible to test all the PHP5 features e.g., if you have some 3
people in php herd), then it's largely up to users to do the testing in ~arch.
p.mask ebuilds will be tested by really *few* users, so most of the bugs will
stay unnoticed until this is moved to ~arch.


> Rather than unmask the packages before they were read, I changed to
> another approach.  I moved the work out of Portage into an overlay
> instead.  This worked well.  It has attracted a bunch of regulars to
> #gentoo-apache who have spent the last few months finding the bugs that
> existed, and making sure that they're fixed and stay fixed.  It looks
> likely that we'll get some new devs out of that too :)

Absolutely. The overlay made the whole thing get into portage *much* faster
then all those months in p.mask.


--
Best regards,

 Jakub Moc
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