Re: [gentoo-dev] summary: proposed solutions to arches/stable problem

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 00:54, Aron Griffis wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:	[Wed Jun 23 2004, 12:08:36PM EDT]
> > Would comments in the ebuild not be enough?  Look at the
> > vmware-workstation-4.5.2 ebuild for an example.
> >
> > I don't see why it would not be easy enough to comment the reasons an
> > ebuild might not be marked stable.  Another example that I can think of
> > is the xorg-x11 ebuilds.  You can see an obvious TODO list before it is
> > considered stable.
>
> I don't think comments would be enough.  Many arch maintainers are
> using ekeyword and ignoring the rest of the ebuild, because it is too
> much to take the time to read through every ebuild looking for red
> flags.  Also, comments make it impossible to use repoman to do the
> checking unless they're in a specific format, and at that point you
> might as well put things in a variable or in metadata

I was bringing up the point that a developer should not be marking a
package stable on their arch without looking for such things.  Many of
us are quite intelligent and don't have to have repoman tell us what to
do.  While it would be nice to have some form of automated check, I
think that for the time being the simplest and quickest solution would
just be to put comments above/below the KEYWORDS for anyone to quickly
see.  There's no need to read the entire ebuild, just skim quickly for
the KEYWORDS line and check for comments right around it.

Now, with all that said, I'd love to see some way to automate this
process, but I'm more of a fan of getting "something working" going
first, then adding polish later, than of sitting around and
bureaucratizing every last detail.  Adding comments is 100% backwards
compatible, requires no extra portage/repoman/e* programming, and is
quickly implemented.  Sounds like a perfect solution for the interim,
and one I plan on continuing to use.  *grin*

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering QA Manager/Games Developer
Gentoo Linux

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