Re: [gentoo-dev] Moving more arches to dev profiles

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> On 22 August 2013 12:24, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:

>> Do we actually have examples of this happening?  I've never had
>> problems with a mix of stable and ~arch keywords.  Granted, I'm not
>> running ~arch on most libs.
>
> Wow! That is something we actively encourage people to avoid. Mixed
> systems are totally
> unsupported and I am sure quite a few bugs are closed as invalid when
> a mixed system is detected.

So, this is what I was talking about - people say this but it really
hasn't been borne out in reality as far as I can tell.  I can
certainly say that maintainers handle bugs from mixed systems all the
time, if for no other reason than it is pretty hard to tell that a
mixed system is in use.

When bugs do crop up on mixed systems they're often the result of
dependency errors - ones that are obscured by the fact that the
package has only been tested on a ~arch system.

The more subtle issue is if a stable package has an unstated
<cat/foo-ver dep and pulling in foo breaks some other stable package.
Those really are still valid bugs, though it may not be so easily
fixed except in the short term (unless slotted a <version dep is hard
to support).  I've gotten caught by these on a few of my own packages,
since I only testing them on ~arch very lightly (since I don't run
~arch in general) - when it happens the deps get fixed and things are
just that much better off when they get to stable (and if ~arch breaks
on rare occasion that is what it is for).

I see the ability to run a mixed system as one of the big benefits of
using Gentoo - few distros support this nearly as well.  As far as it
being unsupported on Gentoo goes - that all depends on your definition
of "support."  We don't do a lot of handholding for ANY of our users.

Rich