Re: [gentoo-dev] Unmasking modular X

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:28:09 -0800 Donnie Berkholz
<spyderous@g.o> wrote:
| Yes, for all 3 people who have a clue what it means when virtual/x11
| gets pulled in. How many users do you seriously think will have a clue
| and think "Oh, virtual/x11 is getting pulled in here. I must have a
| package that isn't ported to modular X somewhere in this list. Let me
| track it down and file a bug."?

When users suddenly see lots of extra X packages being pulled in that
they don't need, it'll be rather obvious (and trivial to track down
with --tree). Especially if it's documented somewhere that "packages
that suddenly pull in lots of extra X packages usually means porting
needed".

| > * The clean solution is the solution originally proposed to this
| > list, and the reason we are using new style virtuals.
| 
| No, this is wrong. The reason we are using new style virtuals is so we
| could have a versioning in what provides virtual/x11. Namely, 6.8 or
| older.

Uh, given that you can do that with old style virtuals, methinks that
isn't the case...

| > * There are currently enough unported packages that many ~arch users
| > will probably have one or two installed (assumption: many users have
| > several utterly random non-mainstream packages installed).
| 
| Possible, but we can't prove this one way or the other. Certainly very
| few modular X users have encountered apps that are still unported, as
| evidenced by very few remaining blockers on #112675.

Sure, but that's because there are relatively few users using hard
masked packages. When you add it to ~arch the number will go up
massively.

| > * You are doing this because you believe that it is better to get
| > every package ported over extremely quickly rather than having the
| > odd package with extra unnecessary listed dependencies, and you do
| > not consider the impact upon our users to be relevant.
| 
| I consider ~arch users to have agreed to help test and fix new things.
| This is included. I would not do the same thing to our stable tree, or
| if we only had a stable tree.
| 
| Yes, I do think it is better to have a quick solution and let some of
| our ~arch users see a couple of blocks, for which they will file bugs.
| Then these bugs will be fixed within a day, and those users will again
| have working systems.

...or you could do things as originally planned, and have no
non-working systems at all and the only consequences for end users will
be a small number of extra packages (that they previously had installed
anyway as part of hugeass X) being pulled in.

| I don't see what the big deal is. By being ~arch users, they're
| already asking to use ebuilds that have a chance of breaking their
| systems permanently, let alone a single 'emerge sync'.

They are asking to use ebuilds that may have undetected issues. They
are not asking to use things that we know fine well are broken. ~arch
is for "will hopefully go stable after further testing", not "stuff
that has a very high chance of screwing you over".

You're deliberately causing nasty problems for ~arch users when there's
a very easy, clean workaround with far lower consequences and the same
end result. This is unacceptable.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm