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

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 21:02 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> X and Y are pretty much irrelevant. The important factor is Z, the
> impact of leaving things the way they are.

...and the idea is to let the Council decide what level of Z is
acceptable.  Currently, it appears as if the "issue" is maintainers
being forced to keep abhorrently old versions of packages, including
security-vulnerable packages, simply because a security-unsupported
architecture hasn't had time to test/update/whatever.

This has been an issue for quite some time.  Of course, the impact is
debatable, but it seems that we cannot agree ourselves on what is
agreeable, so I see this as a point to bring to the Council simply so it
can be resolved "once and for all" and things can resume normal
operation.  I know that I, as an ebuild developer, would be much more
comfortable/accepting of having to keep around old versions of packages,
if the Council had deemed it to be something "important" enough.  No
offence to any alternative architectures or their hard-working team
members, but there are some times when we have to look at the common
good, and forcing maintainers to spend time keeping older ebuilds that
are possibly using older ebuild code and other idiosyncrasies versus the
current versions for the more mainstream architectures simply might not
be worth it for architectures with a very minimal number of users.

I've heard some suggestions for removing stable KEYWORDS on arches that
aren't security supported.  I see this as a possible solution to such
issues, since ~arch packages aren't "security-supported" in the sense of
GLSA and such, so why not keep arches which aren't security-supported
from having stable KEYWORDS?  Of course, this is a "global" change which
affects multiple architectures, so it should be deferred to the Council.
I don't really think it requires a large amount of discussion simply
because it is simple to see how it would come to a swift stand-still.
The arch teams affected will want nothing to change, the package
maintainers will want to make things easier on themselves.  This is to
be expected.  We elect the Council for a reason.  Making decisions like
this is one of them.  Let's let them do their job and follow their
leadership.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation