Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts?

[Pacho Ramos]

El mar, 25-07-2017 a las 13:54 +0200, Michał Górny escribió:
> Dnia 25 lipca 2017 11:18:21 CEST, Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> napisał(a):
> > El mar, 25-07-2017 a las 08:18 +0200, Hans de Graaff escribió:
> > > On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 23:22 +0000, Peter Stuge wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I hold a perhaps radical view: I would like to simply remove
> >
> > stable.
> > > >
> > > > [snip]
> > > >
> > > > I consider dev time a precious resource.
> > >
> > > If we were to drop stable I would have to start maintaining my own
> > > stable lists to determine what would be ready to into production for
> >
> > my
> > > company. In production "works most of the time" and "good enough"
> > > simply aren't good enough.
> > >
> > > I estimate that would at least equal the amount of time I'm currently
> > > spending on Gentoo work, and consequently my contributions to Gentoo
> > > would dwindle to a halt. Most likely I would start looking at other
> > > solutions altogether.
> > >
> > > > More troubleshooting and fixing "hard" problems, less routine work.
> > >
> > > Except that some of that routine work is actually what I enjoy doing
> >
> > in
> > > Gentoo. I already get plenty of the other two in my day job.
> > >
> > > Hans
> >
> > If stable goes away I will simply switch to other distribution and
> > retire
>
> What's the "over my dead commit access" spirit? 
>

Jumping from trying to maintain stable tree to arches dead for ages to drop all
stable trees looks to me like a joke promoted by people that has never handled
any stabilization request and saw on them how running a pure "testing" system is
impossible on many conditions. It seems that some people think that if it fits
ok for them, it will fit for all others like we were all using Gentoo for doing
the same.

I could of course deal with things in my personal computer like, for example,
needing to run gcc-6 (current testing) and having tons of packages failing to
build, or run python-3.6 with only a few subset of packages, or running latest
ffmpeg with random packages going to fail with it, or many other issues that
anyone doing some stabilization work would have noticed. But, of course, I
cannot pretend that all the people using Gentoo systems for working or doing
something productive and that for now rely on me for maintaining or helping them
with the issues that could arise, will now be also forced to run systems that
are likely going to break in different and new ways every time they pretend to
update.

I am also really surprised to see how we can jump from some people that were
fighting in the past against we running automatic scripts that already existed
to fill stabilization bug reports and CC arches after timeouts, to a new
situation of "oh, testing tree is good enough for all the people". We will jump
for some people asking for things like doing deeper tests runs for packages
going to stable (at a level that was really unfeasible on a large scale) to a
situation in that nothing (even no compile test) will be checked at all.

Additionally, this will also cause new issues between people that were used to
run "testing" in the way they are running it now and they pushing to unmask
things faster and, others used to "stable", pushing to keep more things hard
masked until they are fixed. It's not the first time that we see that, for
example, a new glibc version is unmasked when maintainer feels it's ready to
allow people to catch the bugs before it going to be stable. If we have no
stable tree, that couldn't be done as we couldn't use "testing" for the purpose
of "lets unmask X package it give it more visibility and let people catch the
bugs". Then, either we keep breaking "testing" even knowing there is no stable,
or we will start getting lots of packages in package.mask leading to new issues
(like those packages having less visibility and fights between people thinking
that a mid breakage is ok and others that not).

Then, in my case it will be as simply as, if Gentoo becomes testing only, I
won't be able to use it for anything productive, only for "playing" with it...
and then, I won't see much sense on staying while I will need to use a different
distribution de facto for the work and any computer that is not the laptop I use
for committing and doing Gentoo dev work.