1 |
@council; cross posting to provide the reasoning, if discussion continues on |
2 |
council ml, kindly cc me (unsubscribed long ago). Technical |
3 |
discussion (which should be the basis of "why it was banned" should be |
4 |
on dev ml imo). |
5 |
|
6 |
On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 09:11:44PM +0200, Danny van Dyk wrote: |
7 |
> Hi all, |
8 |
> |
9 |
> [CC'ing council@g.o as requested by GLEP amendment from March 8th, 2007] |
10 |
> |
11 |
> A subset of council members decided today that multiple version suffixes |
12 |
> are illegal in the tree pending further notice. This decission can be |
13 |
> appealed at the next Council meeting. If there is sufficient public |
14 |
> demand, an earlier meeting can be held. |
15 |
|
16 |
Rules for 'appealing' are a wee bit sparse, but consider this email an |
17 |
appeal to reopen the issue at the next council meeting (and a |
18 |
suggestion to figure out what appealing requires/involves). Offhand, |
19 |
while there has been sqawking, the functionality has been available |
20 |
for over a year (first 2.1 release of portage), pkgcore has long term |
21 |
supported it, paludis will support it in next released version (it's |
22 |
in trunk at least), PMS has the basic comparison rules doc'd out in |
23 |
addition. |
24 |
|
25 |
As others have said, but reiterating in this message- the only |
26 |
'recent' change for multi-suffix is unlocking it in repoman so folks |
27 |
could use it; nature of backwards compatibility, the support had to be |
28 |
left locked for >6 months to preclude issues from stage releases, only |
29 |
change this side of 2007 was unlocking it. |
30 |
|
31 |
Meanwhile, bug involved which is basically resolved at this point- |
32 |
http://bugs.gentoo.org/166522 |
33 |
|
34 |
If the intention of the subset was to limit things till the allowed |
35 |
permutations of multi-suffix are worked out, please clarify- at least |
36 |
what I've seen thread wise, haven't seen a real explanation for it |
37 |
beyond "multi-suffix is icky and robbat2 has a hackish alternative" :) |
38 |
|
39 |
|
40 |
> This decission has been made to prevent sufficient precedence for |
41 |
> unilateral changes to the tree structure. So far the following package |
42 |
> versions are considered illegal: |
43 |
|
44 |
Please expand further on this one- no offense meant, but the |
45 |
offered reason is slightly weasely in that it's not really saying |
46 |
anything, what it is saying is pretty obfuscated. |
47 |
|
48 |
Best I can figure, the offered reason is "it needs to be blocked |
49 |
before it becomes widespread thus cannot be blocked any further"- |
50 |
which isn't much of a reason since the support is long term there |
51 |
already, and doesn't state *why* it needs to be blocked (just states |
52 |
"it needs to be blocked"). |
53 |
|
54 |
I'm not a mind reader, so lets just assume I'm misreading it. Either |
55 |
way, feel free to expound on the 'why' (either ml or via council |
56 |
appeal). |
57 |
|
58 |
|
59 |
> An illegal version specification of media-sound/alsa-driver has already |
60 |
> been removed from the tree. |
61 |
> |
62 |
> I would like to ask the affected package maintainers to move these |
63 |
> versions to sane version specifications as soon as possible. Thanks in |
64 |
> advance for this. |
65 |
|
66 |
In the future when a subset (or full council, whatever) decides to ban |
67 |
functionality such as this, strongly suggest they ban *further* usage |
68 |
of it- implicit there is that the existing usage is left alone till a |
69 |
full decision can be reached. Y'all banned all usage of it, meaning |
70 |
people have to make changes now. |
71 |
|
72 |
Reasoning is pretty simple; at least for the two versions above, via |
73 |
making it illegal it forces them to transition to a hasty versioning |
74 |
scheme that may (frankly) suck- such as robbats proposal (his proposal |
75 |
works, but it's not human friendly and frankly serves more as a |
76 |
demonstration of why multi-suffix is useful). |
77 |
|
78 |
Joking aside, if the intention is to block further usage till the |
79 |
permutations allowed are ironed out, fair enough- would strongly |
80 |
suggest not decreeing "they've got to go now" when you're stating in |
81 |
the same breath the decision will (effectively) be revisited a few |
82 |
weeks later. Especially since changes to the versioning |
83 |
scheme can be a royal pain in the ass transitioning away from |
84 |
afterwards. |
85 |
|
86 |
~harring |