[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: dropping redundant stable keywords

[Steven J. Long]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 01:08:33AM +0100, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2014 21:03:20 +0000
> "Steven J. Long" wrote:
>
> > Tom Wijsman wrote:
> >
> > > They are less work; since it lets the slower arches move their work
> > > to bugs of important packages that need their attention, instead of
> > > bugs of non-important packages were the stabilization isn't really
> > > necessary.
> >
> > Huh? The slower arch is not keeping up with stabilisation. How can the
> > stabilisation suddenly be unnecessary? If it is not needed, there is
> > no problem, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
>
> It is still necessary, as clear from the difference in importance.
>
> > Much better for the arch in question to field the bug, than tell the
> > user there is no problem, and we don't care. That way you can get the
> > user involved in stabilisation and AT via that bug, instead of turning
> > them away with priggishness.
>
> Problems should be visible instead of hidden, as well as resolved. A
> move in work means a move in work, further implications are yours...

Very gnomic: nothing's being hidden in the above approach. I can't make
sense of the rest so I'll move on, noting only that it's up to the arch
team, as to what _they_ decide to kick back to unstable. And that can
work without a problem if we have a mechanism in place to relieve
maintainers of those bugs. Personally I'd do it after 45 days to speed
things up, and let the ATs concerned, take the bug as and when (eg
turn the stabilisation into a tracker for the slow archs concerned, if
there are multiple.)

> > > > The arguments and headaches at the user, bug
> > > > and AT sides are causing more work (or detracting from real work)
> > > > too.
> > >
> > > Yes, the less work that we can do, the more work the user has to do
> > > as a natural consequence; discussions like these are there to
> > > prevent those headaches way in advance, as we can proper adapt
> > > and/or respond to the situation. And if needed, bring out news such
> > > that the user is well informed. Not sure which argumentation this
> > > is about though.
> >
> > Perfectly simple: instead of having this row repeatedly, or borking
> > archs, let's use the solution proposed by the ARM AT: provide a
> > technical reason why it won't work, rather than a conceptual problem
> > with the "hack".
>
> Searching for such technical reasoning is a leeway for hacking & hoping.

Er what?
 
> Solutions were provided, a policy has been made; we are exactly
> avoiding to row repeatedly, and this is yet another solution I propose:
>
> Provide a technical reason why it will work?

You have colons after a "solution I propose:" with nothing after it.
Kinda sums up your discussion for me. And your answer to "tell us what it
breaks" is "tell us why it works?" Pfft.

> You further demonstrate this solution that I propose we should use:
>
> > The history of computing is littered with hacks that turned out to
> > shed new light on a problem: it's called exploring the problem
> > domain. It's only when you have idiomatic knowledge of the
> > language/tools *and* the specific domain, that you can envision
> > oddball solutions and more importantly _know_ that they will work
> > (perhaps with a bit of tweaking.)
>
> It is called prototyping.

That's just another word: "exploring the problem domain" is much more
useful to keep in mind. Similar to how "Keep it Simple (and) Stupid"
is much more useful while coding, than:
"It is more important to make the purpose of the code unmistakable
than to display virtuosity. The problem with obscure code is that
debugging and modification become much more difficult, and these are
already the hardest aspects of computer programming."
  (Kernighan and Plauger, 1976)

..although the latter is still worth reading/knowing about.

> > Further, the solution steev brought up is much much better than
> > simply dropping the ebuild.
<snip>
> "The -* keyword is special. It is used to indicate package versions
> which are not worth trying to test on unlisted archs." [1]

Finally: some actual content.

> You can keep rehashing about "winning", but all it does is break policy.

*sigh*
The wonderful thing about policy is that it reflects (or is supposed to)
consensus opinion with light to contemporaneous circumstance. Since
circumstances change, so too must policy be open to change or
adaptation, in line with basic principles. So let's look at extending
it, since there is *no* technical problem:

'The redundant -* keyword is a metadata marker. It is used to indicate,
in line with the semantic of "strip all", that the ebuild in question
can only be used for the specific archs noted for one of two reasons:

1) The package-maintainer has stabilised a newer version on at least one
arch personally, the ATs for the archs listed have taken longer than
XX days to test and stabilise, and the maintainer would otherwise drop
the ebuild altogether.

2) The package version is not worth trying to test on unlisted archs.'

The policy which flows from that is:

'In the first case, it is QA policy that a comment of the form:
# STABLEREQ: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=NNNNNN
is required on the line immediately above the KEYWORDS declaration.

This is to aid both automated identification, and human collaboration.'

(The latter explains why a URL, not a bug id, is required. We're trying
to get end-users to help us, so let's make it easy for them.)

I'd personally add:
'It is envisaged that the line will be added by an automated tool at
some point.'

..as well as a requirement for a bug id in the second case, but I
don't know it well enough; I'd certainly want some sort of tracking.

It's hardly an onerous requirement, and a small price to pay: if
we have a policy for how a maintainer drops an ebuild from his
queue due to it being stabilised, which we can trigger scripts
from, we avoid the arguments every year or so, and stop archs from
being borked. We can also speed it up, since we have a mechanism
in-place to support it, as opposed to ad-hoc, flawed decision-making.

The thing I think that's missing from this debate, is an
acknowledgement, or an understanding, that arch-teams are all
effectively working on their own variant of the shared Gentoo tree.
(This includes the concept of upgrades working as smoothly as they
do on other archs, at the PM level.) Similar to other portability
efforts, the tree must support them in that, not make it harder.

Especially not because another developer doesn't care about the arch
in question. That's *natural*, but _cannot_ be cause for dropping
stable ebuilds. The only issue is to take the bugs off their hands,
and we can do that with a simple tweak in metadata, so ffs let's
get on and do it.

-- 
#friendly-coders -- We're friendly, but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)