Re: [gentoo-dev] tentative x86 arch team glep

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 00:03 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> a) Convenience.

Testing.

Some times we want to get user testing on a specific package or two, and
it is easier to distribute it via the normal portage tree than not.
Another reason for masking packages is for security reasons.  This
especially happens when there is no patch or fixed version upstream.  It
allows the user to decide if they wish to continue running a vulnerable
package or not, without forcing the removal of the package from the
tree.

> b) Sadly, unlike some other distributions we don't refuse to package
> things which won't work on all our tier one archs.

This is both a pro and a con.  There are many packages that we include
that will *never* run on architectures but x86/amd64.  These are mostly
binary applications and games, but from the feedback that I have gotten,
our users seem to enjoy that we have these packages in our tree.  It is
definitely a disadvantage when a source-based package does not work on
all architectures, but with the volunteer team that we have, I think we
do pretty well.  The arch teams also do an excellent job of making sure
things either work or don't on their architecture.  The only way we
could enforce source-based packages working on all of our tier-one
architectures would be to have *much* larger arch teams.  It would also
slow down our productivity greatly.  After all, if package foo doesn't
work on sparc, they just don't have to keyword it.  I find this requires
much less manpower than forcing the package to either be removed, no
matter how useful it is, or forcing the sparc team to come up with a
patch so it can work on that architecture.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux