On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:18 +0100, Jose Luis Rivero wrote: > Richard Freeman wrote: > > Jose Luis Rivero wrote: > >> I would prefer to analyze the causes of the slacker arch (manpower, > >> hardware, etc) and if we are not able to solve the problem by any way > >> (asking for new devs, buying hardware, etc) go for mark it as > >> experimental and drop all stable keywords. > > > > How is that better? Instead of dropping one stable package you'd end up > > dropping all of them. A user could accept ~arch and get the same > > behavior without any need to mark every other package in the tree > > unstable. > > Accept ~arch for the random package which has lost the stable keyword a > random day? And next week .. which is going to be the next? The key is > the concept 'stable' and what you hope of it. > > A long/middle-term solution for arches with very few resources instead > of generating problems to users seems a much better approach to me. > > > An arch could put a note to that effect in their installation > > handbook. The user could then choose between a very narrow core of > > stable packages or a wider universe of experimental ones. > > Mixing software branches is very easy in the Gentoo world but it has > some problems. Are you going to install in your stable (production, > critial, important,...) system a combination of packages not tested > before? Because the arch teams or the maintainers are not going to test > every posible combination of core stable + universe of experimental > packages. This is why branches exists. > > > I guess the question is whether package maintainers should be forced to > > maintain packages that are outdated by a significant period of time. > > Suppose something breaks a package that is 3 versions behind stable on > > all archs but one (where it is the current stable). Should the package > > maintainer be required to fix it, rather than just delete it? > > Maintainer has done all he can do, this means: that is broken, this > version fix the problem, go for it. Maintainer's job finishes here, now > it's the problem of your favorite arch team. > > > I suspect > > that the maintainer would be more likely to just leave it broken, which > > doesn't exactly leave things better-off for the end users. > > It's a different approach (maybe with the same bad results) but > different anyway. Leave the bug there, point the user to the bug and > maybe you can gain a new dev or an arch tester. > > While the proposal made here is to throw random keyword problems to > users by policy (which in the case of amd64 some months ago would have > created a complete disaster). > > > I'm sure the maintainers of qt/baselayout/coreutils/etc will exercise > > discretion on removing stable versions of these packages. However, for > > some obscure utility that next-to-nobody uses, does it really hurt to > > move from stable back to unstable if the arch maintainers can't keep up? > > Special cases and special plans are allowed, what we are discussing here > is a general and accepted policy. > > > I guess it comes down to the driving issues. How big a problem are > > stale packages (with the recent movement of a few platforms to > > experimental, is this an already-solved problem?)? How big of a problem > > do arch teams see keeping up with 30-days as (or maybe 60/90)? What are > > the practical (rather than theoretical) ramifications? > > An interesting discussion. Ask our council to listen all parts: > maintainers, current arch teams, the experience of mips, etc. and try to > make a good choice. > > Thanks Richard. > > -- > Jose Luis Rivero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Gentoo/Alpha Gentoo/Do >
Very interesting discussion. Let me take a more or less random post and toss in a slight variation. As you might know, I am an arch maintainer (sparc) and I don't think we are a "slacker architecture." However, I have placed an indefinite hold on a stabalization request from the bug-that-must-not-be-named, because in my opinion this package given the current state of everything should not go stable on sparc (more QA issues than functional ones). How, I wonder, would the variations here handle such a situation? I don't think this situation is unique because arch developers are sometimes going to have a different concept of "stable" than the package developers do. If this does not make sense, is off topic, or irrelevant feel free to ignore it. Regards, Ferris -- Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Developer, Gentoo Linux (Sparc, Userrel, Trustees)
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