Re: [gentoo-dev] Guarantees of unstable architectures

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 2021-07-26 at 17:23 +0100, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
>
> During the open-floor part of this month's Council meeting I asked
> whether there is any official policy regarding what is or is not
> guaranteed for hardware architectures we do not consider stable in
> Gentoo. For reference, according to the current version of
> profiles/arches.desc (commit 7bdebec50c44c0222bf76334c34926b593e94dd4,
> dated 2021-04-05) this means: alpha, ia64, m68k, mips, riscv, s390,
> and all Prefix arches.

For a start, your list includes architectures that have profiles with
various levels of stability.  Rules for stable/dev profiles are
different than rules for exp profiles, and therefore all architectures
that do not have stable/dev profiles give lower stability guarantees.

As for the remaining architectures, I don't think the rules for
architecture that doesn't have stable keywords should be different than
rules for ~arch packages on an architecture with stable keywords.

> As it turns out, we do not in fact have any such policy. On the other
> hand, during my time as a Gentoo developer I have heard from other
> developers a fairly wide range of opinions on the subject - from
> insisting on clean QA results, passing tests etc. regardless of whether
> an arch is stable or not to assuming we guarantee nothing for unstable
> arches.
>
> Anyway, it has been decided that it makes sense to discuss this on the
> mailing list before making it a Council matter. Therefore - what do you
> all think here?

I think the rough rule of thumb should be:

1. For stable keywords, we try really hard not to break anything.  When
doing somewhat risky stuff, we drop keywords to ~arch.  We generally try
to test stuff properly before things go stable.

2. For ~arch keywords, we don't guarantee things won't break but we also
don't break them deliberately.  When doing very risky stuff, we use
masks or drop keywords entirely.  Breakage can still sneak in.

3. For pure exp architectures, we don't guarantee any stability.  We can
drop keywords or break depgraph.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny