Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Tom Wijsman]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 10:46:06 +0000
"Steven J. Long" <slong@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:

> Tom Wijsman wrote:
> > "Steven J. Long" wrote:
> > > What? Without a stable tree, Gentoo is useless afaic.
> >
> > It moves us closer to upstream releases, a little more bleeding
> > edge; a lot of users and developers run that already, it is found
> > to be useful.
>
> What? More vague. As are many of your philosophical statements in
> later and prior mails, so I'll ignore those.

It is reality; and thus, without a stable tree, Gentoo is still useful
for a lot of users and developers. What is vague about that?

> > > I don't think that's what was being proposed, though. The
> > > question was really the old complaint about slow architectures;
> > > the "-* arch" solution sounds like the most reasonable definition
> > > of "dropping" keywords, in the absence of AT communication
> > > otherwise.
> >
> > Dropping keywords and specifying -* are a world apart of each other.
>
> That's why it's in quotes.

Why is there at all if you intend it to be irrelevant to this thread?

> > The former means that it is not ready for wide stable or testing
> > users, the latter means that it has been tested to not work at all;
> > furthermore, we need to explicitly specify which arches in that
> > case.
>
> You're missing the point, again. The question was what does "dropping
> keywords" mean, when the maintainer has stabilised a newer version on
> the arch/s s/he has available, but feels that slower archs are holding
> up that process.

Where is that question? 

> I'm slightly at a loss as to why it's such a big deal to just leave
> the old ebuild as-is, given that anyone on a stabled arch should
> upgrade automatically.

It is when you are running the arch that only has the old version.

> But given that the maintainer feels they don't want that old ebuild
> around, and that the arch in question has not got round to testing the
> new one, for whatever reason (it's their call, after all, as to how
> their arch progresses), instead of simply removing that ebuild, or
> bumping it to unstable (which makes zero sense), just leave it stable
> on the slow arch/s in question, and remove the others.

There are situations (security, stability, incompatibility) where
keeping it in place becomes a much harder task; at which point, removal
is bound to happen. At that point, such action is required.

It becomes faster than you think; if you depend on a library, and the
compatible range of that library gets wiped by a security bug, your
package will suddenly depend on an incompatible newer stabilized
version of the library at which point you are up for either a lot of
hard work or plain out starting the progress of masking and removing it.

> This seems like a rarity, but when it's an issue, people get annoyed
> on either side. The solution proposed by the ARM team,

Where is this solution?

> seems like a simple way round, and indicates clearly to anyone
> perusing the ebuild, that a newer version needs stabling on the
> "slow" archs.

Masking works fine for that too; what this does is make clear to the
user that (1) the current stable version has breakage for a specific
reason, (2) a newer stable version is not yet available and (3) that the
user can choose to keep the breakage or upgrade to an unstable version.

> By all means, raise technical objections; just not a philosophical
> one.

Where are these philosophical objections?

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
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