Re: [gentoo-dev] taking a break from arches stabilization

[Andrew Savchenko]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:27:54 -0400 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 4:05 PM, M. J. Everitt <m.j.everitt@×××.org> wrote:
> > This is why stabilisation, if not for individual package maintainers on
> > amd64, has become a joke, save for Ago's efforts, and recent efforts by
> > kensington to streamline the effort for the likes of ago with his bot,
> > and one or two other arch stabilisers (who I know exist, but not by name
> > or nick).
>
> Sure.  If nobody is maintaining stable keywords on an arch, then there
> shouldn't be stable keywords on that arch, unless the stable keywords
> are used for a different purpose and maintainers are free to downgrade
> them at any time.

I'm confused, again. I can't find any official policy regarding
dekeywording packages from stable to testing.

Can developers remove packages from stable on whim or only on
certain conditions? Under what conditions exactly? Should arch
teams be notified on such actions? Or even requested permissions
from?

IMO a valid reason to remove from stable is arch team failure to
stabilize this package for a long time. But how long? Month, two,
half a year?

What to do with reverse dependencies? Should they be dropped to
~arch altogether with the package in question? Or should their
maintainers be given a warning before? How long to wait after?
One more month or two, another half a year?

Maybe I should move this discussion to the wg_stable ML, but
there are few people there and gentoo-dev has much wider coverage.

A well established arch -> ~arch policy should help to keep number
of stable packages sane and manageable for arch teams. A well
established policy of doing ~arch -> arch by devs themselves will
help to lower load on arch teams as well. So for everyone be happy
(arch teams by keeping them stable and manageable, devs by solving
stabilization requests in a sane time) we need good policies!

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko