[gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[William Hubbs]

All,

It is becoming more and more obvious that we do not have enough manpower
on the arch teams, even some of the ones we consider major arch's, to
keep up with stabilization requests. For example, there is this bug [1],
which is blocking the stabilization of several important packages.

I spoke to one of the team members on one of the affected arch teams on
this bug a couple of weeks ago, and was told just that stabilization
takes time. I pointed out that this was affecting important packages and
I felt that the arch teams should step up their efforts when it comes to
important packages. The arch team member disagreed unless the issue is a
security bug.

The council decision below [2] has made it possible to move on for some
arch's by removing old stable versions of packages 90 days after the
stable request is filed and the arch teams are added if there has been
no action by the specific arch teams listed in the decision, and those
arch teams are the only ones on the bug.

I think we need a global policy that either helps keep the stable tree
up to date or reverts an architecture to ~ over time if the arch team
can't keep up.

Keeping old software  in the stable tree, I think we can agree, isn't
good because newer software, besides having new features, will have bug
fixes.

Also, I think we can agree that allowing maintainers to stabilize new
software on architectures they do not have access to wouldn't be good.

I want comments wrt two ideas:

1. I think maintainers should be able to stabilize their packages on arch's
they have access to. I think this is allowed by some arch teams, but I
think it would be good to formalize it.

2. I would like to see the policy below applied to all arch's [2].

Thoughts?

William

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/487332
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130917-summary.txt