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

[Michał Górny]

On nie, 2017-05-07 at 21:23 +0200, David Seifert wrote:
> 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.
>

I'm against. Turning more arches into dev/exp only introduces hidden
depgraph breakages. I think it'd be better if we looked into
the arch.desc proposal and just disabled stable keywords for those
architectures.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny