I believe QA is important from the perspective that you want to assure that
the ebuilds work. Nothing makes a casual user more annoyed that having an
emerge for his machine fail to work. But if you are running the emerges
unconstrained (e.g. you specify them in the keywords file) then you are
"exposed".
A recent example is the mythtv package. It does not compile on an x86
without significant intervention (Gentoo Bug #292421). How does it make it
into the "release" category without it compiling on the most common
machines? (I'm dealing with an older x86 Pentium IV Prescott machine from
HP and there have to be millions of them out there in the world.).
There should be some sort of QA procedure which says "the package builds on
these minimal list of machines" before it should be released.
Then there is a separate discussion about how to best migrate people from
the "approved" packages to the cutting edge packages with some level of
warning to the user ("this may be problematic")
Robert
