On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Tom Wijsman <tom...@gentoo.org> wrote: > It's at the maintainer's decision to go ahead or not; there's nobody > going to stop the maintainer from adding it to ~. But there are people > that going to complain (users), take action (QA), ... when hell does > break loose because of careless maintenance; putting something in > package.mask for some days doesn't hurt people, big breakage does.
We're basically on the same page, so I won't respond to most of your email. However, in general I'm not a big fan of putting heads on pikes when their only sin was a failure to be lucky. Careless maintainers should be corrected. However, if we're accepting the right level of risk then occasional problems in ~arch should be expected. They should be rare, but when individual problems come up we need to be careful before we assign blame to the maintainer. If they were generally accepting the right level of risk and they're just the guy who drew the short straw this time, we should simply move on. If we're not happy with the overall level of risk then that is something that requires a change distro-wide. Whether we're at the right level of risk is best measured distro-wide. I have to say that QA on Gentoo is FAR better than it ever has been in the past. I can't remember the last time I had widespread breakage as the result of an upgrade. I think the biggest thing that slipped through recently that I took notice of was a pre-mature stabilization of apache-2.4 (for a day or so before being reverted). It worked just fine, but required substantial config changes and lacked appropriate news/docs/etc. I'm not inviting a reduction in QA. However, right now I don't think we need to crack the whip on it either. Let's hold the line, but for the most part maintainers can use discretion. Rich
