Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Call For Agenda Items - 13 May 2014

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Tom Wijsman <TomWij@g.o> wrote:
>  3) contact multiple persons from the arch teams to be fully aware,
>     answers ranging from "Samuli can do that" [a personal exception?]
>     to "That's rude" [the opposite of that exception?]; so, confusing;

Honestly, vague accusations don't serve much purpose here.

Either keep details private to protect identities if you want to talk
about something in general, or just come out and say what you're
concerned with so that we can talk about it in specific.  Naming names
but not the details is basically the worst of both worlds...

I don't know the details of what exactly Samuli stabilized, but
speaking only for myself my understanding of amd64 arch team policy is
that in general we're fine with developers stabilizing their own
packages as long as they actually test them on a stable amd64 system
and otherwise follow all the policies for the stable branch (no major
bugs, ~arch for 30 days, etc).

Rumor has it that the package that was stabilized wasn't one he
maintained, and that the maintainer wasn't given an opportunity to
chime in.  That isn't something anybody should be doing (arch team or
not).  If somebody wants to stabilize something they don't maintain
but the maintainer doesn't object, I don't see a big problem with it
as long as it is tested/etc.  The amd64 team traditionally hasn't been
very territorial about its role, perhaps because the arch is so
ubiquitous.

I don't really see a need for personal exceptions.

That is just my two cents and understanding of what the amd64 arch
team generally does, speaking as somebody who has been on the team in
come capacity for the better part of a decade.  We haven't really been
super-organized as a project in recent years, so I'm not sure anybody
can really speak for the team as a whole.  If we had annual lead
elections then we'd be in a better place to dictate policy.


Honestly, concern about devs messing with stable keywords should
probably just be brought to the attention of arch teams and left at
that.  QA is everybody's business, and this seems like QA, but in this
sort of case the arch teams are in a better position to decide if
there is a problem.

Disclaimer - again I don't know the particulars of what happened, so
to the extent that I'm only hearing part of the story (which is rather
likely), take what applies and ignore the rest.  And again, all of the
above is just my personal two cents.

Rich