Re: [gentoo-dev] Changing policy about -Werror

[Alon Bar-Lev]

On Sat, Sep 15, 2018 at 12:29 AM Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
>
> On 15-09-2018 00:07:12 +0300, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> > >
> > > Perhaps, if one persists on going this route, only do this for platforms
> > > that upstream supports, such that arches which will suffer from this
> > > (typically ppc, sparc, ...) don't have to be blocked by this.
> >
> > Exactly in these cases the -Werror is useful as if upstream expects no
> > warnings then any warning should block installation and trigger bug
> > report. In Gentoo in many cases we use packages on platform has no
> > access to, our feedback to upstream is valuable. A great example is
> > gnutls in which we collectively (maintainer, unstable users,
> > architecture teams, stable users) found issues on architectures that
> > almost nobody other than Gentoo has access to.
> >
>
> I don't believe Gentoo users are (supposed to be) an extension of
> upstreams.

This is exactly what I think that is special about Gentoo, and the
reason I use Gentoo. Unlike other distribution Gentoo is the closest
thing of using upstream. A maintainer in Gentoo who is not see himself
part of the upstream packages he maintains has far less impact than a
maintainer who does see himself as part of upstream or is upstream.

Per your statement, we should not allow any architecture or setup that
upstream, such as exact versioning, architecture or toolchain.

> If upstreams insist on that, they should make their software
> non-free, adding a non-modification clause or something.  In any case,
> it is not Gentoo's job IMHO.

Then we cannot re-distribute or patch, how is it related to the
discussion? We are talking about open source projects and I know it is
cliche... the "greater good" and helping the "free open source
movement" a a viable alternative. I thought this is what unite us
here.

> In the end it is Gentoo who needs to care
> for its users.  I prefer we do that by giving them an option to become
> that extension of upstream, e.g. by USE=upstream-cflags, which Gentoo
> disables by default.

Do you think someone do not care about the users? Do you actually
think upstream does not care about users? I do not understand this
statement. If downstream maintainer believes that upstream is friendly
for the Gentoo overhead (which is higher than binary distributions) or
create the relationship in which Gentoo is 1st citizen at upstream,
why do you think users cannot use vanilla upstream?

> As maintainer and/or enthusiastic user, like you wrote for gnutls, I
> would be more than happy to provide build logs/errors for all the arches
> I have access to.  So like I wrote before, I think we should consider
> case-by-case basis to make it easy to do so.

This entire discussion is to allow case-by-case and not black and
white approach recently enforced.

Regards,
Alon