Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Michał Górny]

Dnia 2014-01-14, o godz. 15:37:19
William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> napisał(a):

> I want comments wrt two ideas:
>
> 1. I think maintainers should be able to stabilize their packages on arch's
> they have access to. I think this is allowed by some arch teams, but I
> think it would be good to formalize it.

I think we'd use more feedback from the 'other' arch teams before
agreeing on this. Some arches may have a pretty tricky issues that
could affect stabilization but which average developer may be not aware
of. Maybe it'd be good if each arch team had a wiki page explaining
the testing process for their arch.

We should also make it clear that the developer is supposed to test
the package on a pure stable system to avoid misunderstandings.

> 2. I would like to see the policy below applied to all arch's [2].
>
> [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20130917-summary.txt

Honestly, this sounds like a very bad idea to me. Even on the minor
architectures.

TLDR: users will end up running unsupported mixed-arch systems
and stabilizing the package again sometime wouldn't make much sense.

Dropping the stable keyword on a package means that user either:

1) has to remove the package and either find an alternative or lose
particular features completely. And unlike with regular package.mask,
he won't get any tips from us. In fact, this policy makes it possible
to kill, say, the last graphical word processor on the arch.

2) has to add package.accept_keywords entry for the package. Which
means turning a pure stable system into an unsupported mixed-keyword
system.

Considering portage behavior, I think that 2) is much more likely. Now,
the keyword may be added per-version or per-package. If it's added
per-version, user simply ends up sticking to another single version
until he thinks of upgrading the package manually.

If it's added per-package, the keyword usually persists on the user's
system. When we bring the stable keywords to the package again, user
would have to notice that and remove his override. How likely is that
going to happen?

So, in the end once we remove stable keyword from a package, most users
add ~arch keyword and future stable keyword on the package becomes
meaningless.

I'd rather go for removing stable keywords from all packages. This
would at least make turning the architecture back stable easy for users.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny