Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for May

[Roy Marples]

On Wed, 2 May 2007 22:00:05 +0100
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@×××××××.org> wrote:
> What, people deliberately breaking policy that directly leads to
> breaking stable and not having any working ebuilds for a package in
> the tree, and then refusing to do anything about it is nothing?
>
> > the issue has been taken care of
>
> You have a conflict of interest in this one. What do other Council
> members who aren't games team members think?
>
> > [to the detriment of users]
>
> How is not having broken packages committed straight to stable
> detrimental to users?

I maintain and play a game called Eternal Lands. I'm a Council member,
but not part of the games team/herd.

One of the problems games have with stable/unstable/testing/whatever
keywords is that upstream changes things that in any other application
just would not change. For example, the network protocol when talking
to servers. EL is very version specific and when a new client is
launched, around once every 6 months they change over right away. That
means our users need the game right away.

I used to commit EL straight to stable for this very reason, but now
after a few Gentoo QA people bitched EL will never ever have a stable
keyword. So instead I periodically have to let our users know how to
unmask EL just so they can play their game.

So no, in many cases NOT committing straight to stable CAN be
detrimental to our users if all they want is a games machine. You could
argue that they shouldn't be using Gentoo, but I would argue why should
we discriminate?

Thanks

Roy

DISCLAIMER: I've not read the bug mentioned as I've lost the email
with it's number so I may just be talking out of my ass.
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