Re: [gentoo-project] call for agenda items -- council meeting 2017-09-10

[Matt Turner]

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 2:09 PM, Aaron Bauman <bman@g.o> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 5, 2017 4:54:35 PM EDT Matt Turner wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 10:22 AM, David Seifert <soap@g.o> wrote:
>> > Hi William,
>> >
>> > given the massive inactivity of the sparc and hppa arches, I would like
>> > to request dropping their profiles to 'dev'. I would like two votes:
>> >
>> > 1) Should sparc be dropped to a 'dev' profile?
>> >
>> > 2) Should hppa be dropped to a 'dev' profile?
>> >
>> > I hope this can clear a lot of the STABLEREQ and KEYWORDREQ backlog
>> > that is making maintenance in Gentoo cumbersome.
>>
>> I am against moving these to dev profiles for all the reasons Michał gives.
>>
>> For everyone's information, sparc is in its current state because
>> bender, our sparc development system hosted at OSUOSL died in April
>> and Infra has not fixed it for whatever reason. I have contacted
>> Oracle about donating modern hardware to the Gentoo Foundation and
>> they expressed interest, but nothing concrete has happened yet.
>>
>> Jack Morgan also decided to retire about the same time because of the
>> apparent crusade to drop support for architectures like sparc.
>>
>
> So all we had was one system and a couple of testers on sparc?  No one seems
> to have complained others than those folks who were impacted by the lack of
> response and time from sparc.
>
>> As an arch tester, I can tell you that it's horribly boring and
>> tedious work. I'd be happy to drop most keywords to ~arch (and Tobias
>> and I have agreed to do exactly this for alpha). In my experience as a
>> member of the MIPS team I can also tell you that fully ~arch is
>> terrible for stage building -- you're constantly dealing with generic
>> unstable problems and not with anything specific to the architecture
>> or stage building. Dropping profiles to dev/exp only exacerbate this
>> problem.
>>
>
> I don't think alpha is the problem here.  Alpha is actually pretty good IIRC.
> Why change anything on alpha?

For a couple of reasons. Obviously there are not lots of alpha users
these days, so investing lots of time in it is sort of a questionable
choice.

But also because it's boring as hell. It's zero fun, and it's not
interesting work. I enjoy working on weird architectures and learning
about them, but arch testing is not that. It's busy work, and I'm busy
enough without it :)

By reducing the set of packages that we have to test and mark stable,
we're left with more time to do the things that we actually find
interesting and focus on the packages that actually matter (the
toolchain, for example).

>> As such, I suggest that instead we consider dropping everything
>> outside of the @system set (and its dependencies) to ~arch for select
>> architectures. This will ensure that the core system remains stable
>> and stage building goes as smoothly as possible. With the
>> significantly reduced stabilization work load, I suspect that the arch
>> testers can keep up with keyword requests and stabilization requests
>> for @system packages.
>>
>> I don't think we need council to be involved in this case. Please have
>> a little more patience until this can be done.
>
> Council definitely needs to be involved.  Everytime this conversation has been
> brought up nothing changes.  The only thing *sure* to change is the
> involvement of the respective arch testers.  It is an almost "strike" like
> mentality when someone debates the relevancy of said architectures.
>
> Letting the broader user base suffer at the behest of a few minor arch teams
> is not useful for anyone.

I truthfully don't know how anyone is suffering. Having some old
ebuilds in the tree because sparc hasn't stabilized something newer is
not causing suffering in my opinion.