Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Kumba wrote:
> Well, I guess it's something that's been needing to be faced for some time
> now, as difficult as it is to do.  Regardless of the accusations and
> counter-accusations flying around in this thread, I'll just go ahead and
> state the fact that yes, we are a "slacker arch".
>
> Why?  Because there's just no time anymore these days and no one left
> really of the original team.  And a lot of that really is my fault.  Tuxus
> may have laid the first keel of our ship, but I was the one who, so long
> ago, made her seaworthy and crewed her.  But now, she's largely a ghost
> ship -- adrift in the seas, and a hazard to the other ships.

thanks ... you've always been a straight shooter without any bs mixed in.

> 1. It's been suggested that mips drop all stable keywords ('mips') leaving
> unstable keywords as-is ('~mips').
>
> That said, however, I don't think it would be appropriate to commit a patch
> to portage that wipes out all our stable keywords in one go.  I think it
> would be more appropriate to phase such a change in gently, because as far
> as I know, no one else has really done this.  The other archs typically
> maintain a stable/unstable set of keywords in the tree.  So I think this
> should be managed by the profiles.  I've been needing to do some profile
> cleanup anyways, so I can probably fiddle with a 2008.0-dev profile set to
> only do ~arch, and then see how that goes.

that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be maintained, let 
the common workflow of developers transition it back to ~arch until someone 
has the time to keep arch usable.  changing profiles.desc accordingly should 
be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for 
such ports ?  i could see all *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman 
to be less verbose about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.

> 3. Should Gentoo even continue to support mips?

i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back* into the 
tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it was hell), 
while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally not a blocker 
for package maintainers.

> Do people even *use* mips?

mips certainly sees use on the embedded side.  there should be no doubt 
whatsoever about its usage.
-mike