Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Ebuild Janitor Project

[foser]

On Sun, 2003-05-11 at 23:01, David Nielsen wrote:

> Okay, our guidelines clearly state that when a fixed ebuild has been
> confirmed by two other people as working, we submit it to bugzilla. All
> the ebuild janitors do is make sure that the ebuilds use the USE flags
> to the maximum of their potential, and of course generally clean them up
> as there's a lot of stuff in some older ebuilds that is no longer valid.
> Your mail clearly showed that you had not read those guidelines..

Why should we read every emerging sub projects documents? That's not
very realistic. Anyway, what defines an ebuild as working (this is a
problem in general) : does it build, does it build on a clean install
with any possible combination of USE flags, does it run fine for 1 month
on someones production server ?

Older ebuilds usually get phased out with time and cleaning is done on
new releases. Sure there will slip stuff trough now and then, nothing
major.

I had a quick peek at your ebuilds btw and i can tell you your
developers clearly do not read ChangeLog's for one, cause some things
that you do are certainly gonna give trouble.

What i'm afraid of here is that you and your project will give more
maintenance type of bugs which correct insignificant stuff, pressuring
an already pressured group of devs. And you guys happily define new USE
flags allover, which also isn't a good thing if you want to see your
changes integrated.

> The plan is NOT to fork portage, the plan is NOT to stage a coup, the
> plan is NOT to start a pissing contest with the developers... the plan
> is quite simple, to make portage even better.

A few ebuild corrections and a fork are whole different things. You have
obviously no idea what it takes to handle a full tree of ebuilds,
otherwise you wouldn't even have mentioned forking here in the first
place.

> Should we be so unlucky as to hit a major problem that we can't handle
> within the project, we will of course take contact to the person in
> charge, or mail gentoo-dev for input depending on the situation.

I'm not sure -dev is the right place for your problems with correcting
ebuild XYZ, it is already too high traffic for the general dev to keep
up with. Bugzilla or direct contact is probably best.

> We have already hit some cases that could be viewed as imperfections in
> the way flags are handled in Portage, and we have yet to receive any
> technical feedback on these issues.

Portage isn't perfect and there's a large TODO for it and i think we are
well aware of that. Developers have limited time, please take that in
mind when you want clarification about the feature you really need right
now/bug you encountered.

- foser


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