Re: [gentoo-dev] kde 3.2 beta2

[foser]

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 10:23 -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 July 2004 09:41 am, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 15:53, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > > I didn't intend for it to be package.mask'd - it's quite stable,
> >
> > I'd like to disagree: Bug 58527
> > Konqueror is consistently segfaulting on my machine, so I'd like to keep
> > 3.3_beta masked until 3.3 final arrives.
> > 3.3 is still a beta, so pushing it in ~x86 seems like a very strange
> > decision to me. ~x86 is for unstable _ebuilds_, not unstable packages as
> > far as I know.
>
> Because it consistently segfaults on your machine is no reason to keep it
> masked - in fact, it works quite well for me and a large number of users or I
> never would have considered it.  Quite likely something else is going on.  A
> backtrace with debugging info would be helpful to solve it.

Actually it is a good reason to keep it masked, especially because we're
talking about a version here that is not by the upstream devs considered
stable. The 'large number of users' point is moot, you cannot just say
it works for 90% of the users & that makes it stable enough. If it
doesn't work for 10% thats still substantial breakage (just making up
numbers here).

> > What's the policy on this?
> > As much as I like bleeding edge stuff, I'd like to keep the bleeding as
> > small as possible :-)
>
> It's far from bleeding edge - the features are frozen and it's namely just bug
> fixes at this point.  If anyone disagrees simply because the package name
> contains the word "beta", then please come at me with more hard evidence.
>
> I assume that vapier thought I "forgot" to package.mask it, so he did it for
> me, and this is why I unmasked it without throwing too much of a fuss.
>
> So, let's be productive here and use the time between now and the final
> release to get the ebuilds and dependencies fixed, make sure things work
> well, and hammer out bugs.  If you still feel like it's too unstable to use,
> then simply don't use it. :)

~arch is for testing ebuilds, not packages. It's quite something that
you decide something to be 'arch stable' before it is deemed stable by
the upstream authors, who have a way more intimate knowledge of their
code than you do. Plus that some arches have a liberal view on marking
packages stable, so they might even make this beta stuff stable at some
point.

Anyway, how would you now test fixes for the 3.2 tree... the 3.3 ~arch
beta packages get now chosen over ~arch 3.2 stuff ?

I know KDE is all slotted and so on (which serves little purpose in
itself besides usually taking up even more diskspace on user machines)
and so it doesn't have to be a big problem, but in general i consider it
very bad behaviour QA wise to make beta stuff available to the general
public (and that is what happens in ~arch).

- foser