Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: profiles/arches.desc - improve repoman flexibility (with other benefits)

[Mart Raudsepp]

This looks good overall, thanks.

If we stay with the whitespace separated columns, the spec should be
clear that implementations should be able to deal with future
additional "columns" in their parsing code.

Below some paint choices from me.

> We introduce a new file "arches.desc" which essentially describes if
> an arch 
> (not a profile) is stable or not. The meaning of profiles.desc is not
> affected;

Essentially the proposal extends profiles/arch.list but due to
backwards compatibility can't just add details there.
As such, in my opinion the file should be called arch.desc (not plural
arches.desc) to go along with that.

> 1] File location:
> profiles/arches.desc    or   metadata/arches.desc

profiles/arch.desc or metadata/repoman/arch.desc

> 3] Meaning of the three values "stable", "testing", "unstable" for
> repoman
>
> * stable: When a profile of arch is tested, then repoman checks
> consistency for 
> "arch" and for "~arch" separately. 
> Which profiles of the arch are tested is still controlled by
> profiles.desc (and 
> -d / -e switches). 
> This is the current behaviour and should be the default if nothing is
> specified 
> for an arch.
>
> * testing: When a profile of arch is tested, then repoman treats
> "arch" as 
> "~arch", and tests consistency only for "~arch".
> Which profiles of the arch are tested is still controlled by
> profiles.desc (and 
> -d / -e switches). 
> A new switch for repoman may be provided to temporarily upgrade an
> arch from 
> "testing" to "stable" (for arch team work).
>
> * unstable: When a profile of arch is tested, then repoman treats
> "arch" as an 
> error and aborts. Consistency is only tested for "~arch".
> Which profiles of the arch are tested is still controlled by
> profiles.desc (and 
> -d / -e switches). 

This sounds more like "testing" to me - architecture is only meant to
have "testing" keywords, which is what I tend to call ~arch because
it's in testing to become "stable" in ~30days or so, instead of calling
it "unstable" (which feels appropriate only for a package that doesn't
carry any stable keywords in older versions either).
While taken from another perspective, the meaning for "testing" as in
this proposal makes sense too - treat all as "testing" keywords.
This goes back to the overloaded terminology concerns that have been
echoed by others as well.
But I don't have any good suggestions for alternatives either right
now. stable/no_stable_check/testing_only? shrug.

> 4] Meaning for other tools
> All arches set to "stable" are considered "stable arches", meaning
> * they get listed first in eshowkw
> * they require stabilization requests in bugzilla
> * ...

If other tools use this, then maybe the repoman specific
metadata/repoman/ path isn't appropriate afterall. So then
profiles/arch.desc or metadata/arch.desc


Mart