Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of unmaintained packages in Gentoo

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 6:01 AM, Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@g.o> wrote:
> On 2017-12-21 01:35, William Hubbs wrote:
>> ~arch *will* have breakages from time to time, sometimes major
>> breakages, until they are masked or fixed. We are not supposed to leave
>> major breakages there, but ~arch is definitely not for the faint of
>> heart. If you are using ~arch, you are expected to be a power user at
>> leasst and be able to recover if your system breaks. Production servers
>> should not be running ~arch at all. That's the whole reason ~arch
>> exists.
>
> If you add something to
> the repository which is keyworded you should at least know that it
> builds and works in the default USE flag configuration.

FWIW, this is a higher standard of quality than what is being proposed
right now for stable keywords (roughly).  Granted, stable would
benefit from being in ~arch for 30 days, and would also benefit from
any testing it took to get the package into ~arch.  However, the
current proposal is that there will be no runtime testing at all of
many packages with stable dependencies.

Ultimately we can define the quality standards however we want and
users can decide what quality level they wish to run.  However, the
obvious goal would be to choose reasonable standards that are useful
to as many as possible.

Do we want more packages just dumped into ~arch and let the users
running ~arch report runtime failures?  Or do we want packages in
~arch to be more stale?

Part of me wonders if issues with stable are causing issues with
~arch.  If stable is regarded as stale that is going to push people
into ~arch who really intend to have stable systems.  That said you do
want testing systems to have a reasonably low bug count because it is
kind of hard to test the latest chromium beta when X11 isn't working.

-- 
Rich