Re: [gentoo-dev] Fixing elasticsearch maintainer

[Patrick Lauer]

On 05/19/2017 03:10 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-05-17 at 18:38 +0200, Patrick Lauer wrote:
>> Bonus mention:
>> bbdc5412061adf598ed935697441a7d6b05f7614
>>      app-admin/logstash-bin: drop old
>>
>>      Signed-off-by: Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o>
>>
>> That removed the versions I was using, so I better maintain the versions
>> I use in an overlay. Well ok then.
>>
>
> I'm sorry that the situation turned out badly for you. However, I would
> like to point out that problems like this are rarely unilateral,
> and usually involve issues on both ends.
>
> I'd like to ask you a very simple question: what did you do to ensure
> that the versions you are using are not accidentally removed?
>
> I could have a few ideas, such as:
>
> a. slotting the package to indicate that multiple versions might be
> meaningful,
>
> b. opening a bug requesting the old version to be kept,
>
> c. leaving a comment in the ebuild (unlikely to help but still),
>
> d. just mailing proxy-maint@ to let us know of the issue.


I tried removing proxy-maint from metadata after multiple discussions 
failed. Extra happiness towards monsieurp "but the GH PR is over 3 days 
old, I have to commit" and gokturk "Yes I understand. I commit anyway"

This has been an uphill struggle since about October, around New Year I 
stopped actively caring, and since these two commits:

12c3eacda7c4d23686eaf10eab21d810cc95ea49
f42d6679c038c3efcc257d38547267d01823aea9

I see no way to fix this situation that doesn't involve a review board 
in front of all proxy-maint commits. Because we discussed this in IRC, 
and still ... "but is open bug"

> However, as far as I'm aware none of this happened. Note that I might
> have missed the mail, or it might have been sent before I joined --
> correct me if that is the case.

There were multiple discussions in IRC, which the involved people 
usually forgot within about 20 minutes and then resumed doing stuff.

I tried removing proxy-maint from metadata, which was reverted (sooo how 
does one *not* have constant interference?)

> As Alec pointed out, it is a normal procedure in Gentoo to remove old
> versions of software if there is no explicit indication that they need
> to be kept. Therefore, I don't see anything wrong with the proxied
> maintainer wishing to clean the old versions up and/or not requesting
> your explicit permission for that. If you needed the old versions, you
> should have made that clear.

One could ask, maybe. I guess I can (mis)understand this to mean that I 
can do with packages with you in metadata what I want because ... err... 
shiny!

> I should also point out that the steps you've taken (and listed in this
> mail) are not really relevant. They make you look like a sloppy
> maintainer, and a bad Gentoo developer at the best -- and I doubt anyone
> would connect removing proxy-maint team with a necessity of keeping
> an old version.

The cooperation that I had with ferki was pretty good (mostly because we 
sat next to each other in the office). The contributions from Tomas were 
on average pretty ok, just needed some minor cleanups here and there.

The blind "but PR is open for 3 days" commits from proxy-maint made it 
extremely hard to review what changed in a timely manner, so that I 
basically didn't want to care for this pile of stupid for the last, 
ahem, 6 months or so. Especially since whenever I wanted to review 
things some joker made some new changes which made me go "eh whut how 
you? banana banana!" so I pushed reviewing a week into the future and ...

I have no idea how I could have fixed this without the QA+Comrel 
banhammer combo, which is a totally insane "fix" to a problem that 
shouldn't even exist. But I see no other options how to make people 
understand that "No means no".

Is this the new normal?