Re: [gentoo-dev] QA Roles v2

[Michael Cummings]

On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 20:49 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Now, you've heard that dropping keywords is bad. But you have a clever
> idea, and make the dep alsa? ( !sparc? ( alsa libraries ) ). This gets
> past repoman just fine.
>

<STOP> As any arch can tell you, that's never stopped me - *IF* you do
it correctly, ie comment out the existing keywords, add the keywords
that the package can support, and file a bug against the arch's that you
had to drop explaining the need for re-keywording because of a new dep
that they don't yet support. AFAIK that's the correct way to do it - and
I believe that pretty strongly since at this point there isn't a single
arch that wouldn't have filed a grievance against me otherwise. Sure,
those bugs may stay open for months and months and months because ia64
doesn't have the resources to devote (which is understood), but at that
point you have 2 references for users, the ebuild with the commented out
line, the ChangeLog, and the bug.

Is this not how its supposed to be done? Because if it is, maybe those
insistant on the !arch method should be pointed to that and leave it up
to the arch's to make the decision of whether to keyword or disable
specific support. Devs acting on behalf of a herd shouldn't be making
these kind of arch decisions, but instead leaving it up to devs acting
with their arch hats on. Maybe the two meet under the same roof
sometimes, but more times than not they don't. Yep, that's a lot more
work and effort and pain - but afaik it follows good qa methods.

And despite the length of this message, I haven't spoken on one side of
the fence or the other I think...sweet :)

~mcummings