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

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 07:12:45PM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 12/20/2017 06:58 PM, William Hubbs wrote:
> >
> > There already is an overlay for dying packages, it is called graveyard,
> > but no one is putting things there.
> >
> > This email conflates old dying packages with new versions, which are a
> > completely separate issue.
> >
>
> Lack of new versions *is* dying. But I can make a package not-dying in a
> few seconds by merging a PR, so long as you don't expect me to do the
> (relatively high) level of QA required for ~arch.
>
>
> > If a new version of a package is known to cause wide scale breakage, it
> > goes in package.mask until the breakage is resolved. Otherwise, putting
> > it in ~ is fine. I don't see the need for another level of keywords.
>
> The quality of ~arch is its own worst enemy; these days, stable packages
> are just old ~arch packages. Users and developers expect ~arch to work,
> and we have no real policy or documentation stating that it won't. Many
> people will tell you that ~arch works better than stable, because it
> gets fixed faster.

~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.

Yes, ~arch gets fixed faster than stable, but that is to be expected.
However, it is definitely not a good reason to put your production system on
full ~arch.

So, I guess this means that the quality of the ~arch tree is supposed to
be somewhat lower than the quality of the stable tree.

William