[gentoo-dev] Re: New Working Group established to evaluate the stable tree

[Duncan]

William Hubbs posted on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 15:01:05 -0500 as excerpted:

> On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 03:27:43PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:

>> Well, I wasn't suggesting that breaking the depgraph is great.  Just
>> that I think it is better than calling things stable which aren't.
>>
>> A better approach is a script that does the keyword cleanup.
>>
>> So, if you want to reap an ebuild you run "destabilize foo-1.2.ebuild".
>>  It searches the tree for all reverse deps and removes stable keywords
>> from those.  Then you commit all of that in one commit.
>
>  This works unless you are talking about packages in @system.
> I do see core packages on these arches also languish in ~ for months
> with open stable requests.
>
> The only way to handle one of those would be to remove the old version
> and let their deptree break until they catch up.

If system-core packages are languishing in ~ for months on some archs, 
isn't it time for maintainers of those system packages to appeal to 
council to regress those archs to experimental and kill their stable 
keywords "at will"?

Because if the archs can't keep up with even @system package 
stabilizations, anything else is effectively a lie anyway, so all we're 
doing is better reflecting the actual situation.

Of course it shouldn't greatly affect current users, since they can put 
their current packages in an overlay and keep them marked stable and 
installed if they wish, switching to ~arch at their convenience, or 
choosing to stay back on what was once stable and never upgrading, if 
they so choose.  Of course if there's other distros supporting that arch, 
they can switch to them too, but given what gentoo supports and that it's 
often one of the last to drop support, their options are likely to be 
pretty limited in that regard as well.

If I were a user on such an arch, I'd actually prefer that to the lie 
that there was a stable arch... that wasn't stable-as-in-petrified, 
anyway.

(Tho to be fair I'm not the most unbiased in that regard, since I only 
run ~arch anyway, and can't find a reason why I'd even consider the 
stale^H^Hble tree on gentoo.  There are situations in which I might 
consider that stale an advantage, but if I were to be in a place where 
they were priority, I'd want something with the decade of support of a 
redhat/centos or the like.)

-- 
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