Raúl Porcel wrote:
So it would be cool if they accepted help from other devs who don't have an amd64 system but have access to one and can test stuff. Cla is willing to help.
I think this may be more a question of what our policy should be regarding level of testing/stability accepted. I'm sure manpower is a factor as well (number of devs isn't necessarily directly proportional to number of hours spent by those devs per week on gentoo).
I don't keyword a package stable unless I've done at least a moderate amount of testing on the package to ensure that it works. If a package looks simple but obscure I might go ahead and install it and play with it, but I'd probably never keyword an emacs package stable, since I don't ever use emacs and I won't pretend that all there is to it is installing it and typing "hello world" and figuring out how to quit.
Also, the more critical a package is the less likely I am to keyword it without care - I'm not going to keyword apache stable unless I've installed it and put several of my php/cgi-perl apps through a fair number of chores since I know that people who run apache generally care that it works.
If there are folks out there who can test on amd64 systems then I'm sure that the amd64 team would look forward to their help (just contact kingtaco about it) - either by arch testing or perhaps by just keywording as appropriate. However, we do need to be careful about just going on a hunt to close bugs - "if it builds then it's stable" isn't really a policy I think we want to follow. As an amd64 user as well as a dev I know that I'd rather be a little further behind on package foo (with the ability to accept ~amd64 on it if I wanted to) than to have packages breaking every other week because somebody keyworded them just because it compiled and didn't have any glaring faults.
I think we also need better coordination across gentoo regarding when packages should be stabilized. I've seen amd64 CC'ed on stablereq bugs filed by end users, and arch teams keywording them left and right, and there is no sign that the package maintainer wants the package stabilized. I know that I'd be annoyed if arch teams stabilized a package that I maintained and I didn't intend for it to become stable for whatever reason. At the very least maintainers should be contacted before packages go stable - and they should probably document their intent in STABLEREQ bugs before everybody goes crazy closing them out.
I think that if we have the right policies then we'll be where we want to be. Personally, it doesn't concern me a great deal that there are tons of bugs open on an arch in and of itself (although blockers and security bugs are a different matter). I'd rather that then keyword something stable anytime one person (usually not the maintainer) asks us to. And users who feel like they're being held up should feel free to ping a dev to talk about it - and comments by users and maintainers in bugs indicating how stable a package really is make people like me more warm and fuzzy about keywording it without as much personal testing.
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