Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Do (old-ish) Portage QA checks comprise policy?
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2019 15:01:13
Message-Id: 33564bf19f26e1f99d9efca5d1c15c079c01e3d9.camel@gentoo.org
1 Hi,
2
3 TL;DR: If a QA check is enforced by Portage for a reasonably long time,
4 does it constitute policy? Or can it be changed unilaterally by Portage
5 team?
6
7
8 William Hubbs has recently attempted to remove one of Portage's QA
9 checks [1]. Not only we disagree on the change in question, we also
10 disagree on whether the original behavior constitutes policy. I'd like
11 to bring the latter to wider discussion, without focusing on this
12 particular example.
13
14 FWIU, William's argument is that the QA team has not formally approved
15 such a policy (did QA even exist back then?), therefore it is not a
16 binding policy and can be changed through internal Portage patch review.
17
18 I disagree with this assessment. This check that has been present
19 in Portage since at least 2005, and has reliably enforced specific way
20 of writing ebuilds (influencing e.g. gen_usr_ldscript() function).
21 After 14 years, I believe this certainly counts as de-facto policy
22 and is not something to be changed lightly. Such change needs to be
23 discussed on gentoo-dev@, and preferably supported by the research
24 of the original rationale.
25
26 This is not the only QA check in Portage that reliably affects how we
27 are writing ebuilds today, yet were never formally approved or written
28 down in developer documentation. I think that this is partially simply
29 because there were never major disagreement about them, and since
30 Portage has reliably enforced them there were never any real need to
31 take them elsewhere. I think they should be considered equally to well-
32 defined policies.
33
34 Hence, my question: should the policies implied by historical Portage
35 checks be considered official, and be changed with due diligence? Or
36 should they be merely considered implementation details, and should
37 Portage developers make unilateral decisions on changing or removing
38 them?
39
40
41 [1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/message/6e4cfbb0ef9c36dc6511d4f2003cc458
42
43 --
44 Best regards,
45 Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Do (old-ish) Portage QA checks comprise policy? Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o>