Re: [gentoo-dev] new developers' keyword requests

[Sam Jorna]

On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 10:09:04AM +0800, Ian Delaney wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2016 16:00:02 +0200
> Jeroen Roovers <jer@g.o> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 19 May 2016 18:36:22 -0700
> > Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > > To make sure I understand what you're getting at, are you saying
> > > some devs get on board and then request to add keywords to packages
> > > that they already maintain? If said arches are already supported in
> > > Gentoo I see little problem with that, especially if they intend on
> > > being part of the arch testing team for that arch or have access to
> > > the hardware.
> >
> > I am not talking about adding architecture keywords to profiles/.
> > I am talking about adding architecture keywords to ebuilds.
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> >      jer
> >
>
> Firstly I think previous replies have been de-railed on talking about
> new alternate arches, which personally I think is the last thing we
> need. If there is any confusion it is because the term keyword, like
> most terms in I.T. gets pushed and pulled and stretched until it breaks.
> To my understanding, KEYWORDS are arches.  But being told to 'keyword' a
> package could mean perhaps, well, Hu knows.

I don't know of any other usages of "KEYWORDS" within Gentoo - to my
knowledge the only definition is a list of which architectures a package
is known to work or not work on, and an indication of the level of
testing and expected usability on that architecture.

Is there some other definition that I'm missing?

> Supporting users doing just this lately, I have come across this a few
> times.  Users and new devs are expected to be very ignorant of minor
> arches, and despite having docs already informing them that they are
> short staffed and have enough to do, the practicalities of how and why
> to keyword request or not are still veiled in mystery. Users want to
> keyword according to what they see supported upstream just because
> they can. They appear to need it made manually clear to them that there
> are qualifiers and conditions for putting something up for keywording.
> These also I believe are as much as mystery to users as they are to
> devs.

Appropriate use of KEYWORDS is actually covered in the Developer
quizzes, so I would have instead expected new developers to be more
acutely aware of the fact that keywording on minor arches should be
generally reserved for an as-needed basis.

> How to establish a level of desire form userland to have gentoo
> support the arch in the package??
> How to establish sane rationale for it being put up for stable??
> The last I heard was along the lines of, well, only put it up if it has
> already been put up in the past.(someone in the past had a check list?)
>
> If anyone, the members of the arch teams might have some insights based
> upon first hand dealing with packages and their categories. Frankly,
> how you can expect or achieve users and new devs to assess these is
> more the issue, and I do not see there is any obvious path of becoming
> informed of the interest of an invisible audience; userland

As far as I know, users (as in non-maintainers - those out "in the wild")
can file keyword request bugs and it's up to the maintainer to then
determine relevancy and CC appropriate arch teams; and Bugzilla has a
voting feature[0] allowing users to indicate the strength of community
demand by voting on those bugs (which I have seen done previously).

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#votes

-- 
Sam Jorna
GnuPG Key: D6180C26