Re: [gentoo-dev] apache and ~arch

[Grant Goodyear]

Michael Stewart wrote: [Mon Mar 14 2005, 03:23:38AM CST]
> I believe the specific situation you are referring to is mod_php. We did
> patch it and have it hard masked, and wanted the php herd's stamp of
> approval before we unmasked it. All of us that are working on this are
> rather new developers (I myself have only been a dev since December),
> and didn't want to break someone else's package, especially one as
> complex as PHP. So we left it hard-masked while unmasking ours, and
> referenced users to the already open bug about mod_php and also pointed
> users at the hard-masked revision of mod_php that worked for us. I agree
> it could have been handled better, but what we did seemed like enough at
> the time. The packages are in ~arch, and we never intended them to go to
> stable without all other expected packages there as well.

Again, I certainly understand that one makes mistakes.  My e-mail was
not intended to castigate the new apache devs, but instead to point out
an error, explain my rationale, and subtly suggest that you not do
something similar in the future.  Reading your response, and especially
hollow's blog posting, however, it seems that I also should have more
firmly pointed out a misconception: ~arch in Gentoo is supposed to be
as fully functional as the Gentoo devs can make it.  Saying that "we
never intended them to go to stable without all other expected packages
there as well" means that point was missed; for situations where you
want to release before all packages are ready we have package.mask.
The rationale is fairly simple: ~arch is for testing ebuilds,
essentially for finding non-trivial errors (especially errors in
interactions between packages), and that's awfully hard to do if not
all packages are available.

> Some have suggested that we move backwards into hard-mask. I disagree
> with this. When we moved from hard-mask to ~arch, we did so to get a
> wider testing audience. We have run into a few glitches here and there,
> but that is the point of ~arch, to work all the glitches out before
> moving to stable. The major breakage that most users came across was the
> unexpected non-working of mod_php. And now mod_php revision that works
> with the new apache revision is no longer in hard-mask. Moving back to
> hard-mask at this point in time would only cause more headaches then
> pushing forward to get everything working together. Arguments for either
> side are welcome however.

Now that the shiny new mod_php ebuild is available, I tend to agree
that masking the new stuff would be a mistake.  Indeed, masking any
package that has already been released is almost always a disaster if
the new release was incompatible with the old release.  That's
precisely why one has to be so careful not to unmask packages before
they're ready.

Finally, let me say that I'm quite grateful that you folks are
maintaining apache.  It's an important package, and not a simple one,
and I appreciate all of the work that went into the new config.  You
folks did good work, and along the way made a moderately big mistake.
It happens.  Just fix it (it looks like it mostly is, now),  please
don't do it again, and we'll all move on.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76