Rich Freeman wrote: > Jeroen Roovers wrote: > > "Paweł Hajdan" wrote: > > > >> Why not allow maintainers to drop redundant stable and even ~arch > >> keywords from their packages? > > > > This is standard practice already. > > If there is still pain then maybe we need to re-communicate this, or > clarify. > > To me if a package is in the tree and is outdated, but kept for only > the benefit of a few lagging archs, then maintainers can close bugs as > WONTFIX if they don't pertain to newer versions. If that is the case > then there is no cost to keeping the old packages around. > > The main concern is around maintenance burden. The only way to reduce > maintenance burden is to do less maintenance (I haven't heard any > suggestions that will somehow make bugs go away). If maintainers are > doing more maintenance than they are required to do, then simply > reinforcing existing policy could solve the problem. We just need to > align around expectations.
Closing those bugs as WONTFIX is more work, and in some cases the bugs would be justified, if the user is on the slow arch in question. The arguments and headaches at the user, bug and AT sides are causing more work (or detracting from real work) too. I don't think it should be general policy to drop stable keywords; as someone said, the latest stable in the tree /is/ the stable one, and there's no real point in adding work, *unless* the maintainer actually wants to drop the ebuild, but cannot due to the holdup with slower archs. Just keep the old ebuilds as useful metadata, subject to the usual version-control cycle, but iff it's causing you problems and you want to drop it, mark it with: "-* slowe rarch" so we can script off it and automate bug-handling etc. so your life is easier, as well as the archs in question (and their users.) Regards, steveL. -- #friendly-coders -- We're friendly, but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)
