Re: [gentoo-dev] About reducing or even removing stable tree for some arches

[William Hubbs]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 02:34:50PM +0100, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> Hello
>
> Every day I am hitting tons of blockers stabilizations and keywording
> requests for alpha, sparc, ia64, ppc and ppc64.
>
> Again, I would suggest to either decrease radically the amount of stable
> packages of some of that arches or even make them testing only.
>
> For reducing their stable tree, my suggestion would be to either keep
> their current stage3 packages stable or stage3+some concrete (and
> public) list of packages.
>
> Currently situation is not good at all as we rely on mostly one member
> needing to handle most stable work and, if any stablereq has any issue
> leading to it not being able to be handled in an "automated" way, the
> bug gets blocked for months. Also, keywording work is mostly stalled on
> this arches as it's done by even less people.
>
> The current policy of maintainers dropping keywords after 90 days is
> simply not applied because it leads up to that maintainer needing to
> kill himself that keyword and ALL the reverse deps keywords and, then,
> all that effort should probably be replaced by making the opposite, I
> mean, reducing the stable tree of that arches to a minimum and moving
> all the other packages to testing. The main advantage of this is that it
> needs maybe more effort in one round but it solves the problem for the
> future. On the other hand trying to kill keywords of a package *and all
> its reverse deps* requires a lot of work every time the problem appears.

I think the cleanest way forward would be to mark these arch's dev or
exp in the profiles. That way, maintainers don't have to worry about
them and the people maintaining the arch's can determine what needs to
be stabilized at their own paces.

William