Re: Assigning keyword/stable bugs to arch teams (WAS: [gentoo-dev] dropping redundant stable keywords)

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 06:58:47PM +0100, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 09:41:03 +0100
> Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> wrote:
>
> > El dom, 16-02-2014 a las 00:37 +0100, Jeroen Roovers escribió:
> > [...]
> > > > If we want a separate assignee for old stabilizations, what about
> > > > a separate project that handles this, or maybe we could assign
> > > > the bugs to m-n or something until the arch teams catch up?
> > >
> > > Again, where is the man power for that? :-)
> > >
> > > It's the maintainers that this problem hurts most, so they could and
> > > should be fixing it themselves - after a few months of waiting,
> > > reminding arch teams and gritting your teeth over it, just remove
> > > the old stable ebuilds[1].
> > >
> > >
> > >      jer
> > >
> > >
> > > [1] Where possible. If this happens with non-dev, non-experimental
> > >     architectures and keeping the old ebuilds is a real problem, the
> > >     architecture's status should be reconsidered. As has been done
> > > on this mailing list time and again. If an arch team cannot even be
> > >     bothered to keep @system up to date, then why bother pretending
> > >     it's anywhere near "stable"?
> > >
> >
> > I agree with Jeroen here. If the arch teams that are usually a bit
> > behind are not able to fix the bugs, I doubt we will gain anything
> > assigning bugs to them. Because of the way testing/stabilization bugs
> > work, arch teams should always check the bugs with them CCed and,
> > then, I don't think getting that bugs assigned to them would change
> > much.
>
> That would be true if the context of this thread were the arch team;
> however, the context of this thread is the maintainer as that is the
> person experiencing the problem that was put forward.
>
> The solution here thus intends to address the maintainer, which benefits
> from this; while it keeps the arch team's the same, whether the arch
> team does more with this is their own responsibility.
>
> > Also, keeping the bugs assigned to package maintainers will still
> > allow them to try to get that pending bugs fixed (or resolved in some
> > way) as they will take care more about that specific package status.
>
> Package maintainers have better things to do. While it would allow
> for example the GNOME team to maintain GNOME 2 which sticks around; it
> actually happening is another story as they want to see GNOME 2 go,
> because maintaining multiple versions of GNOME costs too much time.
>
> > If we get that bugs assigned to arch teams, they will likely be
> > ignored by both parts, getting worse.
>
> At this point the arch team can realize that keeping the version around
> is an unrealistic goal, they can then take a decision to stop keeping
> it around and thus remove it; if needed, taking additional steps.

You are still assuming that the arch team is fully staffed. If they are
not, the old versions of packages still remain in the tree indefinitely.
As a maintainer, at some point, I don't want them around.

Keeping them around can force me to keep old migration code for example
that automates upgrading to new versions longer than I would have to
otherwise.

William