On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:19:10 -0500 William Hubbs <willi...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> All, > > I'm not really sure what the answer to this problem is, so I want to > know what the group thinks about how we can handle it. > > During the last release of OpenRC, I learned that people *do* run > production servers on ~arch. While I don't, and asked it just because of the large amount; it appears from some things lately, and not just OpenRC, that there is a certain group that regards ~arch as some kind of new stable. This isn't solely about versions entering ~arch, but also about versions leaving ~arch; as ~ is for testing, people should expect their version to break and they should also expect that they cannot rely on a version remaining in the Portage tree, that's just wrong... As a result, there are complaints regarding ~; while really, we should have more complaints regarding stable instead. From the forums I see more and more people switching to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="arch ~arch"; so, we are getting close to a point where stable becomes less important. This is really not the direction we should be heading... > I asked about it and was told that the > reason for this is bitrot in the stable tree. Let me dig up an example... Our last sys-kernel/gentoo-sources stabilization was 3 months ago: 15 May 2013; Agostino Sarubbo <a...@gentoo.org> gentoo-sources-3.8.13.ebuild: Stable for amd64, wrt bug #469508 This is in my opinion bitrot; and it emphasizes where the problem lies, the arch teams simply don't have enough resources to keep up with the stabilization that we would like to see, more than once a month. We should crowd source testing in one way or the other; that way, we get feedback from a larger share of users, instead of overloading 'ago'... 3.9.11-r1 was blocked (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477976) for something that shouldn't even be problematic and 3.10.7 is filed (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481522) which I am waiting for but it seems to take some time; so, I hope we get a stabilized kernel this time, because otherwise we might as well drop keywords... Besides the latest stable branch, it would be nice to have stable LTS; that is Long Term Stable, thus the older 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4 branches. > My question is, how can we improve our stabilization > procedures/policies so we can convince people not to run production > servers on ~arch and keep the stable tree more up to date? As I hinted at above; I think we really need to make it less strict and crowd source the efforts to the users, as the strictness as well as the limited resources slow things down a lot. This also makes perfect sense; we are providing ~ as a means for the users to test, but how do the users report back "success" (or failures)? Even for failures, I often discover that a lot of users do not file bugs; or they do file bugs, but in the wrong place (forums, FB, G+, chat, ...) and we don't discover them in time. Those that I catch I refer them to https://bugs.gentoo.org; but well, I can't catch them all. It is due to the lack of such feedback that we have a too huge need from the arch teams; if we can get more feedback, we would not have to rely so much to the arch teams and assign them to what really needs proper testing. For example: @system packages, popular packages, ... Some attention on where we spend our resources as well as how much delay there is for some packages need to be considered; otherwise we're just wasting time on stabilizing very small and unimportant packages. -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : tom...@gentoo.org GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
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