On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 11:22 PM, Sergei Trofimovich <sly...@gentoo.org>
wrote:

> TL;DR;TL;DR:
> ------------
>
> This email seeks for one step towards less toil tied to gentoo's
> keywording/stabilization process. I've CCed a few groups who
> might be interested in making this area better:
>
> - gentoo-dev@ as it affects most devs (and non-devs!)
> - wg-stable@ as it overlaps quite a bit with efforts staged on STABLEREQ
>   (should I join? :)
> - arch-leads@ as it directly helps (or breaks everything for) arch teams
> - all individual arches for wider visibility
>

Thanks for kicking off this discussion. As a stable user, this is an
important topic to me.

Your email is kind of long, and I wonder if we can condense the problem
back to simpler first principles.

First, the assumption in our processes seems to be that many or important
bugs will be due to architecture-specific differences, and I wonder if that
assumption really holds up. Do arch testers for a smaller arch often find
problems that were not noticed on one of the larger arches? With the
languages and tools that we have today, it seems like for many of our
packages, bugs due to architectural differences represent a minority of the
problems we found. In this case, the whole idea of per-arch stabilization
does not really make sense, and doing away with that idea could drastically
shortcut our process.

Second, I believe a lot of the value in our stable tree comes *just* from
the requirement that stabilization is only requested after 30 days without
major bugs/changes in the unstable tree. Assuming there are enough users of
a package on unstable, that means important bugs can be shaken out before a
version hits stable. This could mean that potentially, even if we inverted
our entire model to say we "automatically" stabilize after a 30-day period
without major bugs, we hit most of the value of the stable tree with again
drastically reduced pain/work.

Cheers,

Dirkjan

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