On Sun, 2014-06-29 at 23:01 -0500, William Hubbs wrote: > All, > > I am starting a new thread so we don't refer to a specific package, but I > am quoting Rich and hasufell from the previous masking thread. > > On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 10:04:54AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 8:36 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > > This is still too vague for me. If it's expected to be short-term, then > > > it can as well just land in ~arch. > > > > A package that hasn't been tested AT ALL doesn't belong in ~arch. > > Suppose the maintainer is unable to test some aspect of the package, > > or any aspect of the package? Do we want it to break completely for > > ~arch? In that event, nobody will run ~arch for that package, and > > then it still isn't getting tested. > > I'm not saying that we should just randomly throw something into ~arch > without testing it, but ~arch users are running ~arch with the > understanding that their systems will break from time to time and they > are expected to be able to deal with it when/if it happens. ~arch is > not a second stable branch.
I realize that not everybody agrees with me, but I see ~arch as a "semi-stable" branch - an internally consistent branch for people who don't feel like maintaining a horrific mess of keywords and masks in their /etc/portage and don't want to wait weeks/months for bugfixes to their favorite ebuilds to be marked stable by overworked arch teams, and who don't mind seeing an occasional build failure or crash as a consequence of standing closer to the bleeding edge. In my view, experimental work not ready for general exposure should be kept in overlays and/or the main tree's package.mask, depending on how the particular project's workflow is organized. > > I agree that masking for testing is like having a 3rd branch, but I'm > > not convinced that this is a bad thing. ~arch should be for packages > > that have received rudimentary testing and which are ready for testing > > by a larger population. Masking should be used for packages that > > haven't received rudimentary testing - they might not have been tested > > at all. > > The concern with this argument is the definition of rudimentary testing > is subjective, especially when a package supports many possible > configurations. > > I think some packages need wide testing before they go stable, and that > is where ~arch can help out. > > In particular, I would argue that for system-critical packages, users > should be very careful about running ~arch unless they know what the > fallout can be. At any given stability level, a system-critical library ideally ought to be better-tested than, say, a game or a media player. In practice, this sometimes doesn't happen, because some system-critical library maintainers don't care about ~arch users and dump experimental code in their laps, and in my view that's a bad thing because it encourages users to come up with ad-hoc mixed arch/~arch setups which have *never* been tested by any developer.
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