Re: [gentoo-project] Making Gentoo more fun

[Benda Xu]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Robbins <drobbins@××××××.org> writes:

> I have been reflecting on the recently much-broadcasted conflict
> between mgorny and zlg, and considering that maybe at the root of it
> all, we have a process issue rather than a personal one.
>
> Consider this -- Gentoo has very little buffer between what is
> committed to the Portage tree and what ends up on a user's
> system. Because of this, if you are a senior dev on Gentoo, you can
> feel some sense of responsibility for breakages that may occur for
> users. There generate a significant amount of frustration and stress
> as you try to plug the QA holes that you see appearing before you.
>
> This amount of fragility could make one quite anxious, irritable and
> even bitter towards more junior developers who make mistakes. It could
> lead to, rather than addressing this underlying problem, potentially
> being overly harsh with those who make mistakes.

I agree with your analsys.  My taking of this problem has 3 directions,
they may complement each other:

1. enforce peer-review of commits, such as Gerrit before commits landing
   git repository.

2. enforce CI before real commits.  If someone care about some features
   of a critical ebuild, write tests to prevent others from breaking it!

   repoman has already done part of the job.

3. let us meet more frequently offline, so that we get more acquainted
   and become more forgivable and relaxed to each other.

> I think it may also be leading to placing too much emphasis on making
> emerge perfect, to the point where it can fix any problem on any
> user's system, when really this is not realistic -- it is still
> possible to commit something to the tree that has a bad dependency in
> it and makes life miserable for users. There's very little that emerge
> can do to protect users from this -- it just blindly does what the
> dependencies tell it to do.
>
> I've been reflecting on these things because we've instituted a new
> system in Funtoo that seems to be helping. This is not an attempt to
> toot my own horn, but I am finally starting to feel a bit of stress
> relief in this area due to a new process we are using.  We have
> organized the upstream Portage tree into 'kits', or sub-trees, and
> then we snapshot these sub-trees. Our snapshotted versions are called
> 'prime' kits, and we will backport security fixes and do cautious
> version bumping in these kits. But then we work on newer versions of
> kits to eventually replace the (aging) prime kits, and these are based
> on newer snapshots from Gentoo. And we also test to make sure that
> people can upgrade cleanly (no weird dep issues) when transitioning
> from the older kit to the newer kit.
>
> While this interferes somewhat with the "bleeding edge, rolling" model
> that Gentoo is famous for, it does provide the opportunity to have
> kits that are stable, not unlike the Gentoo stable branch, except the
> kits concept provides finer granularity. So for example, you could
> choose to have a stable core system, but use a more bleeding-edge
> python or xorg, for example. And I can make sure that things like
> firmware and certificates always have the latest version.Yes, you can
> do the same thing with package.unmask, but it is not nearly as clean
> and modular.

Thanks for introducing the kits.  But to be honest, I am not too
impressed with this system.  It feels like stable keywords.  You argued
kits provides more granularity than stable keywords.  We may extend the
stable keywords policy to make it more flexible.

> Just food for thought -- I am wondering if something similar in
> Gentoo-land might tackle the root cause of these issues. I know people
> are here because they care about Gentoo, but we want to make the
> processes work for developers both new and bearded, and they should
> allow for some margin of error by developers, because we all make
> mistakes.
>
> I also hate to see what may be a technical/process issue snowball into
> bad blood between people on the project.

Me too.  I hate that.  It is toxic.

Yours,
Benda