Pacho Ramos posted on Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:34:50 +0100 as excerpted: > The current policy of maintainers dropping keywords after 90 days is > simply not applied because it leads up to that maintainer needing to > kill himself that keyword and ALL the reverse deps keywords and, then, > all that effort should probably be replaced by making the opposite, I > mean, reducing the stable tree of that arches to a minimum and moving > all the other packages to testing. The main advantage of this is that it > needs maybe more effort in one round but it solves the problem for the > future. On the other hand trying to kill keywords of a package *and all > its reverse deps* requires a lot of work every time the problem appears.
Perhaps my non-dev status prevents me from understanding the difficulty here, but... I really don't see the problem. 1) I don't believe the 90-day policy was /supposed/ to be particularly easy. It was supposed to be a pressure relief valve, to release pressure only if it built up beyond a certain level, such that both archs and package-devs could still live with the situation by keeping the pressure from going off the scale at either location. As a pressure reliever, what you defined as a bug I'd rather define as a feature. If the situation gets bad enough and the pressure high enough, there's an approved method to relieve it, but that method itself isn't entirely pain-free, so it doesn't tend to be used until the pain of not using it is worse than the pain of using it, which, I'd argue, is functioning as intended. 2) The very requirement of having to kill ALL the reverse-deps seems to me to already lessen the pressure necessary to tip the balance the next time, since either it's not the problem its made out to be if it's only a handful of packages, or within a few cycles of doing this, there will be dramatically fewer packages keyworded in the first place to worry about, and thus dramatically fewer packages to have to dekeyword this time around. Yes, the first time's going to be hell. And the second time could easily be 90-95% as bad, particularly if the two packages are in separate areas and there's little overlap. But the tenth? By then, the number of packages still keyworded in the first place should be down enough to make a difference. And the 20th? By then, things should be much more reasonable. So you're suggesting a flag day and volunteering to do most of the work. I won't argue with that as I don't have a dog in this fight. But it seems to me, by the time you do even say five existing 90-day- dekeywording-policy actions, you'll either have something already looking a lot more like the goal you outline above than the current state and will be well on your way, or if that DIDN'T dekeyword enough packages to already be easier, then by definition there's only a handful of such dependencies in the first place. Either way, I simply don't see the problem, certainly so when comparing the work of just doing it under the existing policy, to fighting the political war necessary to change it -- and even assuming a win, ending up dekeywording pretty much the same set of packages as you'd have done with a few rounds under the existing policy anyway. Again, not that I disagree. As I said, no dog in this fight and I might actually benefit by the developer time then freed up to work on fights I do have a dog in. But I expect this question will come up in some form in any case, and by answering it now, it'll already be dealt with. Plus, I'm simply curious, as there's evidently an angle I'm blind to, and now being aware of that blindness, it's disturbing enough to me that I want to be rid of it, thus the question. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
