[gentoo-dev] Re: Transitioning from #!/sbin/runscript to,#!/sbin/openrc-run

[Duncan]

Patrick Lauer posted on Thu, 05 May 2016 09:32:01 +0200 as excerpted:

> So you're saying that a Gentoo-specific change in Gentoo happens because
> the Gentoo maintainer doesn't care about Gentoo? ;)

I'm saying that big-picture, there's more than one distro, and once a 
particular package graduates beyond a single distro, as openrc has, 
there's likely to be some more or less disruptive changes.

Meanwhile, seems there was another package with a runscript executable 
that debian happens to package, proving my point about namespace 
collision.  Today that's a problem for debian; tomorrow it could well be 
a problem for a would-be gentoo packager (dev or user) of that same 
package... if some gentooer out there isn't /already/ having to deal with 
the problem.  So it's not just debian openrc is helping here, it's the 
entire floss community that may at some point be interested in software 
with that same name, including gentoo.

> Somehow I still don't see a *problem* being solved, and the runscript
> binary/symlink pretty much has to stay there indefinitely unless you
> want to make life exciting for people that have their own or adapted
> init scripts.

Many gentoo precedents define your "indefinitely" as "one year at 
minimum".  Beyond that, it's (gentoo) maintainer's preference, taking 
account of how much of the rest of the tree it still effects, getting 
someone to take care of the lagging packages if necessary, etc.  But 
while we don't /try/ to break stuff out of the tree, if it's out of tree 
and particularly if it's in some user's non-public/non-layman overlay or 
simply a script hacked up on their system, we prioritize accordingly, and 
yes, we recognize that sometimes that stuff breaks with such changes, but 
that's held to be a case of "if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces".

Despite all that, I expect it'll be more like two years' worth as 
deprecated but still there, simply for practicality reasons.  Meanwhile, 
once the deprecation warning goes in, a year or more is plenty of time to 
change things so they'll still work after the deprecation period, and 
like I said, while we recognize that some users may not upgrade in in 
over a year, that really has been held to be their problem and 
responsibility at that point, including if they entirely missed the 
deprecation warnings as a result of not upgrading in over a year.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman