Broken breakage
tl;dr: Stuff is broken, and no one seems to care In August the git "migration" happened, moving our main repository from old stupid cvs to modern shiny git. Well, migration is not the word I'd use, because this was an untested forced migration that is now, months later, still suffering from regressions and failures. But, hey, no more cvs! That's good because, reasons. So at first there was [1] the lack of proper Manifests. Which broke things for all rsync users for a few hours. Once that was 'fixed' there was the fun of [2], which made emerge --sync very expensive because it refetched lots of files. Every time. The 'fix' to the fix of the fix for that is still in progress ... And a few little things like [3] happened. Oopsie. Also there seems to be confusion how git works, leading to hilarity like [4]. Now [5] was reported. Who needs ChangeLogs, this is git! Except for all users, who don't get ChangeLogs. Well, let's add them and [6] not test what happens. Guess what? Stuff breaks more. And they are added backwards so that emerge --changelog fails in a different way. No, I didn't want to read all changlog except the part I cared about. And fixing that introduces [7] some more regressions that broke updating @system for about 3.5 days. The fix to that fix (notice a pattern here?) broke rsync for *all* users [8]. Almost as if no one ever tests things in a test environment ... but hey, we're agile, let's fix stuff in production! And the manifest issues are still [9] making life exciting. So to summarize, in about 5 months there was user-visible breakage: - ~1 day downtime for git migration (no updates) - 8h no Manifests (no updates possible) - a few days of emerge --sync being stupidly slow - a few days of emerge-webrsync not updating - about 3 months of emerge --changelog being broken, just to be broken in a different way - 3.5 days of emerge @system being broken - about a day of emerge --sync needing manual interaction to be able to update again - a few days of grub being uninstallable (iow, making installing impossible for many users) So all in all emerge --sync && emerge -uND @system being down for >10% of the time. Now, I don't know if you use Gentoo, but I do, and I use it at work, so having this level of randomization happen is not really useful. Tell me then, please - what can I/we do so that this kind of breakage stops, and we can actually aim at having a most excellent distro? In the long run I am considering just creating my own clone of all infrastructure bits so I can fix things, but it's an option that is needlessly braindead, wasting effort, and not really useful to users that are not me. [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557184 [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557192 [3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557344 [4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557400 [5] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557826 [6] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565574 [7] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565694 [8] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567074 [9] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567830
