Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Steev Klimaszewski]

On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 03:15 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> Tom Wijsman posted on Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:11:48 +0100 as excerpted:
>
> [Seven J. Long wrote...]
>
> >> There's plenty of ways to stay on the bleeding-edge; throwing out the
> >> baby with the bathwater will only tip you over it, and bork the distro
> >> for the rest of us, and everyone down the line.
> >
> > Why do we have the baby in the first place?
>
> IOW, it's not throwing the "baby" out with the bathwater any longer, as
> the "baby" long ago died of old age and is now a decaying corpse; there's
> no "baby" to throw out any longer!
>
> Going with the analogy, that package has become an adult, grown old, got
> sick, died, and now there are rather obvious and smelly signs of decay!
> The neighbors complained (filed bugs) about the smell and when the
> authorities investigated they found the decaying body (the bugs are
> blocked pending removal of a long dead and should be gone version)!
>
> Yet some slow arch is insisting the corpse is not only alive and well,
> but that it's still married to it, and the people coming to try and take
> it away to the morgue aka VCS archives as part of the becoming-a-biohazard
> cleanup (removing the package, thus unblocking those blocked bugs) are
> somehow abusing their authority!
>
> Until the body becomes a biohazard (long dead package presence blocking
> bug resolution), it's arguably the business of the deluded husband still
> refusing to believe the death of his wife, but once it becomes a biohazard
> the rest of the community is now threatened as well and something must be
> done, thus this thread.
>
> [OK, the analogy triggered my imagination and I went with it...]
>

That got dark rather quickly...

And the problem isn't that it's some dead thing around that no one
wants, at least, no one except the team that it's the ONLY working
version... so we go from having a decrepit but working version to... no
alternative.