Re: [gentoo-dev] Arches marking ebuilds stable before maintainer

[foser]

On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 18:55 -0400, Travis Tilley wrote:
> well most maintainers are on x86, no? i was venting valid frustrations here.

At this point yes. My suggestions actually pave the way for that to
change, I expected that to be something you would appreciate.

> do i really need to defend myself here? if you think i shouldnt have cvs
> access, feel free to let the right people know. i'm already suspended for
> snapping at you. to quote another dev (anonymously) "we've been wanting to
> tell foser that for a long time", so i'm assuming you've been pissing off
> mips devs too. perhaps we should all have our cvs access removed :)

Well, that makes it a lot less anonymous already. Personally I don't
expect people to like me when i tell them they do things the wrong way,
but someone has to do it. It used to be perfectly alright to tell
someone an ebuild sucked, but nowadays we have to sugarcoat everything
to not upset some fragile ego somewhere. I guess it's the size of the
project thats interfering with getting to know and respect eachother.

The dev in question can tell me in person how he thinks about me, that's
alright, I won't hold it against him. The only thing that bothers me is
that I always get criticized about _how_ I say someone something, never
about _what_ I say. So in the end it usually turns out I do have valid
points, only it gets snowed under in a personal attack on me. It's not a
shame to learn.

> the maintainer's arch cant always know about problems... for example, i was
> pretty confident about gcc 3.4 after doing a 3.4 only install on amd64 and
> ppc64 just to realise that this was still not really possible on x86 (at the
> time)... and i only realised this from reading the forums and bugzilla, not
> because some interested x86 dev came to me and said so.

Other devs have 'special cased' the toolchain ebuilds archwise in this
thread previously and I agree there. They don't really fall in the
category where you can apply the basic QA rules, that doesn't mean the
whole tree should be treated like that.

Off-topic, as far as gcc-3.4.0 goes, in my experience with earlier
stable gcc updates we never really moved on after at least 1 or 2 minor
releases to smooth out the rough edges. .0 releases just tend not to be
good enough, so x86 wise there's no rush in my opinion.

> > Actually 'i haven't marked this as stable yet on my arch' is a good
> > reason if the ebuild maintainer tells you so, for the simple reason that
> > you lack the overview over the full package maintenance outside the
> > scope of your arch. I cannot believe how you can so easily disregard
> > this form of basic QA.
>
> if it's the ONLY reason, it is NOT a good reason. if there is another reason
> WHY it hasnt been marked stable, then THAT is the "good reason" for not
> marking it stable on another arch... did you read my argument or are all my
> words pointless to you and not worth your time?

Same question to you. The problem is not so much that it isn't a good
reason, it's more that the arch maintainer just doesn't know if there's
a reason or not. The lack of knowledge is the problem, that's really the
basic background why it _is_ a good enough reason alone.

> i was aware of the issues involved here and thus didnt touch this version on
> my arch until it was stable on x86 for a good while. /then/ i marked it
> stable... you made it very well known that there were problems, as did the
> bug reports on bugzilla. there was a good reason here for not marking it
> stable other than the fact that it wasnt marked stable on the maintainer's
> arch (x86).

Well, I made it as well known as possible that it was problematic as you
say, still some arch maintainers didn't know or forgot. That's exactly
why there should be the basic safeguard of 'package maintainers' arch
moving to stable first, before any other. It's just a simple precaution
to prevent things like this happening. Obviously from this example the
basic developer interaction (irc/email) isn't sufficient : you did it ok
this time, someone else didn't. And with 2 or 3 arches and 30 devs -like
when i started- this is quickly resolved, but it's not like that
anymore.

- foser