[gentoo-dev] About reducing or even removing stable tree for some arches

[Pacho Ramos]

Hello

Every day I am hitting tons of blockers stabilizations and keywording
requests for alpha, sparc, ia64, ppc and ppc64. 

Again, I would suggest to either decrease radically the amount of stable
packages of some of that arches or even make them testing only.

For reducing their stable tree, my suggestion would be to either keep
their current stage3 packages stable or stage3+some concrete (and
public) list of packages.

Currently situation is not good at all as we rely on mostly one member
needing to handle most stable work and, if any stablereq has any issue
leading to it not being able to be handled in an "automated" way, the
bug gets blocked for months. Also, keywording work is mostly stalled on
this arches as it's done by even less people.

The current policy of maintainers dropping keywords after 90 days is
simply not applied because it leads up to that maintainer needing to
kill himself that keyword and ALL the reverse deps keywords and, then,
all that effort should probably be replaced by making the opposite, I
mean, reducing the stable tree of that arches to a minimum and moving
all the other packages to testing. The main advantage of this is that it
needs maybe more effort in one round but it solves the problem for the
future. On the other hand trying to kill keywords of a package *and all
its reverse deps* requires a lot of work every time the problem appears.

Of course I volunteer for doing the work of reducing that stable trees
if relevant arch teams agree.

Thanks a lot for your help