Re: [gentoo-dev] Arches marking ebuilds stable before maintainer

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 00:04:21 +0200 foser <foser@g.o> wrote:
| So the only one with full knowledge about the package, who handles the
| Gentoo bugreports, follows upstream development, interacts with users,
| etc. is the actual 'package maintainer'. Only he has the full picture
| and therefore decides when a certain version of a package can go
| stable.

...which would be fine, except that as an arch maintainer, I can tell
you that the majority of problems we get are arch specific. It's not
just because of endianness, 32 vs 64 and so on -- different archs have
completely different versions of core libraries and toolchain
components. For example, any gcc3.4 related bugs aren't an issue at all
for x86 right now, but they are on amd64 and mips. Similarly, we all use
different kernel headers, glibc versions and toolkit versions.

(Sidenote to random spectators: no, we will not use the same version
for every package on every arch. Down that path lies Debian.)

Besides, if a package version is really that buggy, why isn't it in
package.mask? The ~ keyword shouldn't be used for dodgy experimental
releases, it should be used for packages which are candidates to become
stable after a reasonable (package and arch dependent) period. If an
ebuild is in the tree and not-*/.mask'ed, we consider it a fair target
for going stable.

Incidentally, it would be nice if stable keywording wasn't the domain of
the package maintainers at all. That should be a job for arch teams,
since individual package maintainers don't know the state of any given
arch. Unfortunately, I don't think the x86 team is big enough to keep up
with that kind of thing yet, given the number of packages keyworded for
them...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm