Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Harald van Dijk]

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 09:20:08AM +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> Michael Kirkland wrote:
>
> > I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the
> > Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are
> > polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will
> > work".
> >
> > This leads to people trying to maintain a
> > frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it
> > and never knowing when things can be removed from it.
> >
> > I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to
> > from "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still
> > have open bugs for some people.
> >
> > That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> > "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> > the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
>
> I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
> starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
> behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:

Disclaimer: I maintain none of the packages you mentioned, so these are
possible reasons, there may be other more important reasons that I
didn't think of.

> Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)

The ebuild itself causes problems with LINGUAS because of a portage bug
(or limitation). And on IRC just yesterday two devs complained about
Firefox because for one, 1.5 was unacceptably slow, and for another
1.5.0.3 took 100% CPU. Additionally, the latest stable is 1.0.8, which
was released less than a month ago; the 1.0 versions are still
maintained.

> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)

kdelibs-3.5.2 needed fixes and workarounds for miscompilations and
crashes less than a month ago, according to the changelog.

> Xorg 7: 5 months

Strange behaviour for some with virtual/x11 being provided when it
shouldn't be, causing missing dependencies for other ebuilds, and
compilation issues.

> I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
> we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
> KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct.
> You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
> probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
> things to go?
> I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
> bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
> is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
> in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
> One nice thing for users would be the addition of more metabugs for recent
> packages. I'd like to know why some packages are not stable, and I am not
> the only one. Adding a metabug instead of closing all requests for
> stabilization with wontfix/wontresolve is much more userfriendly.

Searching for open and recently closed bugs about the packages in
question can help a lot in figuring out reasons packages aren't
marked stable. As for metabugs, they would help if the package
maintainers feel software is almost ready to go stable and just want to
finish up the remaining issues, but in other cases, why? How does it
help?

> Once again, I love to use Gentoo but I don't understand the current
> situation. I have the feeling that I'm not the only user so I posted these
> comments in order to discuss them. Hopefully you don't mind trying to
> explain it all...
>
> Bart
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