Re: [gentoo-dev] Arches marking ebuilds stable before maintainer

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 18 June 2004 18:45, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> ...which would be fine, except that as an arch maintainer, I can tell
> you that the majority of problems we get are arch specific. It's not
> just because of endianness, 32 vs 64 and so on -- different archs have
> completely different versions of core libraries and toolchain
> components. For example, any gcc3.4 related bugs aren't an issue at all
> for x86 right now, but they are on amd64 and mips. Similarly, we all use
> different kernel headers, glibc versions and toolkit versions.
>
> (Sidenote to random spectators: no, we will not use the same version
> for every package on every arch. Down that path lies Debian.)
>
> Besides, if a package version is really that buggy, why isn't it in
> package.mask? The ~ keyword shouldn't be used for dodgy experimental
> releases, it should be used for packages which are candidates to become
> stable after a reasonable (package and arch dependent) period. If an
> ebuild is in the tree and not-*/.mask'ed, we consider it a fair target
> for going stable.

Sometimes it is the case that because of the state of the package or the 
ebuild (missing features) you don't want to make a certain ebuild stable at 
all. Or that you know that it could create problems not directly related to 
the ebuild being bad. In any case from a maintainer viewpoint is is quite 
anoying to have your judgement challenged under your fingers.

> Incidentally, it would be nice if stable keywording wasn't the domain of
> the package maintainers at all. That should be a job for arch teams,
> since individual package maintainers don't know the state of any given
> arch. Unfortunately, I don't think the x86 team is big enough to keep up
> with that kind of thing yet, given the number of packages keyworded for
> them...

Is there a x86 team?

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net