On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:35:32 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@ciaranm.org> wrote:
> It is widely perceived that Gentoo has a huge problem with slacker
> archs cluttering up the tree and making maintainers' work harder.
> Clearly, something needs to be done about this.
<snip>
Wow, I almost don't know where to begin. The amount of FUD,
misinformation, and outright lies floating around all of this bullshit
is astounding. If you believe everything you've read from some
incessantly obsessive blogger and some extremely loud and misinformed
bug wrangler, you would believe that the mips team killed the baby
jesus, caused the plagues, invaded Europe, and invaded Iraq...all with
me as their supreme dictator. And yes, to you so impaired, that was
indeed sarcasm. It seems like many of you are under some sort of
warped impression that *I* am actively trying to hold back the tree,
with my sole reason to piss of ebuild maintainers. That is so
incredibly far from the truth as to be completely insane. So, let's try
to clear some of this up, shall we?
First of all, to you vivo, before you say something else you might
regret later, you should consider that mips *has* gotten help recently,
and said help is doing a very good job. The situation is only
improving. More on this later. And also, it is *not* my fault that
Diego quit. But if you want to keep loudly whining on the mailing list
here about how I'm "still around" (I'm not actually) and Diego is gone,
keep on going. More on this later too. You can say whatever you want
about me, I actually have thick skin, unlike certain other people,
however you are not making the situation any better. I suggest you
stop.
To t3h Harring and Mr. Parallel Grapefruit, I agree with you, Lies,
Damn Lies, and Statistics. Citing percentages is circling around the
point that Ciaran made. Some arch could only have 10 packages
keyworded out of the entire tree, with 3 of them being "slackers" as
defined here. This arch would lead your list by a wide margin. The
fact is, tree bloat is measured purely by the *absolute number* of
packages which are behind another arch.
All of that said, how about we clear up all of the misinformation about
how arch keywording really works, how deps get wrongly dropped, and then
explain why mips has generally fallen behind. This isn't an excuse,
but is merely a statement of facts which describe the situation.
First, the ~arch tree. This one is easy. In most cases, you can
merely compile test something against the ~arch tree, and then do a
fairly quick run test to make sure things seem to be working as they
should. If additional deps are required, they must be similarly
tested. Another rule of thumb is that if other arches already have
~arch keywords and there have been no bugs saying something like "this
is complete crap and shouldn't be in the tree", then you can have
fairly good assurance that you haven't missed any critical bugs (aside
from really really wacky arch specific stuff...more on this later).
Furthermore, ebuild maintainers are allowed (and encouraged) to carry
~arch keywords forward during version bumps.
How about the stable arch tree? This one is
trickier. In order to bump an ebuild into the stable tree, the arch
team has to be far more careful. Not only must this ebuild have been
in ~arch for 30 days without any bug reports, but it must have been
*extensively* tested against the current stable tree to ensure no
breakages. Furthermore, all required deps of said ebuild which are
also ~arch must be similarly tested. This is extremely tedious work
that requires a lot of time, both machine and developer. For those
arches where the best possible supported machines might be on par with
a pentium2 300mhz box, the machine time becomes almost ridiculous.
Now, consider the mips arch. As I insinuated above, the fastest of our
supported machines really isn't a speed demon. However, there is even
*more* complexity with mips. We support both big endian *and* little
endian configurations across *multiple* ABIs. This makes testing even
more difficult and tedious. I can only speak for myself, but I always
strived to make sure anything I ever keyworded worked on *both* our
standard 32-bit ABI, and the more experimental n32 (for simplicity, it
is a quasi 64-bit ABI with a lot of funkiness). The compile time
required for all this testing is ridiculous. It might take two weeks
or longer to get something very large compiled (accounting for compile
failures and other unforeseen stuff) on the machines I had available.
Other developers are similarly constrained by the speed of their
machines. Again, not an excuse, but just a fact of how things are. If
I had infinite time to work on Gentoo, this would not be an issue.
I fully admit that for pretty much the entire past year, I have not had
time to do any of this, so I have slacked, and is the reason that I
have ultimately retired. It seems like time constraints have similarly
affected the rest of the team, with a recent notable exception (yes,
there are more than just me...try reading mips.gentoo.org). In order
to try and get some help in the past, I have actively tried to donate
machines to developers, with lukewarm interest at best. But hey, if
nobody wants to work on mips, that's their decision. This is a
volunteer effort...you can do what you want.
How did this situation happen in the first place? Owing to the apparent
"slacking" of our team due to a mere lack of time to get useful stuff
done, we have not only fallen back in getting things keyworded, but
haven't had the resources to answer a multitude of "stable my apps" or
"keyword this new dep" bugs that have been filed by ebuild
maintainers. I submit that in many cases, said maintainers are filing
these bugs for little reason other than "I want a new version in the
tree, look at it, it's shiny". Thus, those tend to automatically get
pushed to the back of the line of importance. However, in many cases,
ebuild developers simply refuse to wait and drop old ebuilds, thus
breaking arch deps and creating more bugs.
Now, let us consider security bugs. These are extremely problematic,
but not because of the security issues. See, in Gentoo we have both
"security supported" and "security unsupported" arches. The supported
arches are required to have a security liaison who responds to security
bugs, and ensures that keywords are added to new, non-vulnerable
versions. In order to stay supported, they *must* do this. However,
the unsupported arches have absolutely no obligation to answer to these
bugs. Unsupported arches do not have a security liaison. And,
bluntly, unsupported arches are not at all required to do *anything*
about security bugs. Having something tested in said arches tree is
far more important than making sure all versions are totally secure.
Yet, ebuild maintainers have bordered on militant tactics to complain
to unsupported arches about security bugs. Basically, there is a huge
conflict of interest that is DEFINED BY POLICY. Yes, that's right, the
currently accepted policy automatically creates a conflict. In many
cases, instead of being patient, these maintainers simply drop the last
version of an ebuild with arch keywords for an unsupported arch, thus
breaking the tree, and wouldn't you know, creating even *more* bugs. I
suggest that if both arch teams and ebuild developers (especially
ebuild developers) think this sucks, then try to get the policy
changed. Until then, you will have to deal with it.
All of this has gotten us to the current situation, where ebuild
maintainers are really pissed off at the mips team, and where the mips
team is pissed off at ebuild developers for breaking our tree. This is
why I get so mad sometimes. Anyone knows me knows that I have
*consistently* screamed at people for breaking arch deps (rather than
just being an asshole because I'm retiring, as a certain group seems to
think). I would much rather have something that I know has been
tested in the tree, rather than expend unnecessary and unavailable
time to answer to every single security bug.
Considering all that I have said above, it was no surprise
that I got a bit irritated by bug #163795. However, I will say that I
merely started out by saying it would have been nice for Diego to
actually attempt to contact one of us on irc for a quick chat before
dropping mips from all of KDE. His notoriously short fuse caused that
discussion to rapidly proceed to all-out flame. Now, let's fast-forward
a bit to the incident over the weekend. I will preface this by saying
that recently the mips team has obtained a very good developer who has
been spending a ridiculous amount of time testing and closing bugs for
us. Eroyf has really saved us recently, and I hope he will continue to
keep doing a good job. He is spending a lot of time doing things the
RightWay(TM). If you don't remember from above, this means extensive
compile and run testing of things before adding keywords.
Well, eroyf decided he would like to work on KDE
keywording, which is his choice. This is open source volunteer work,
after all. Well, in attempting to compile kde-3.5.6, he ran into some
nasty compile errors that could not be easily resolved. Guess what?
That means 3.5.6 can not be keyworded on mips. Then, working exactly
as he was trained, he realized that 3.5.5 had no such problems, and
proceeded to do his extensive testing on that version for potential
addition to the ~mips tree. He made a passing comment about this on
irc, which was "overheard" by Diego. Instead of being constructive,
Diego resorted to outright preemptive harassing, which I believe to be a
direct result of sour grapes from bug #163795. I know it's hard for
those of you who believe that Diego's shit smells like roses, but he
was harassing an arch developer who was only trying to do his job
correctly. I took exception, so I screamed at Diego as I have many
other people during my time in Gentoo (yes, shocking as it may be, I
have called people twats and fuckheads without them quitting as a
result). Apparently that was just too much for him, so not only did he
quit, but he attempted to blackmail devrel into firing me instantly.
Perhaps, I should have been slightly less blunt with him, but I stand
by my comments. I do not feel I was wrong to tell him off for
harassing eroyf.
Now this is just my opinion and not fact, but Diego
was merely looking for an excuse to quit, so don't blame me. I didn't
force him to quit, he did that of his own free will. Anyone who knows
Diego knows that he has been talking of quitting for a long time now.
If not me, he would surely have found another excuse, but whatever.
What is done is done. I indeed have retired, so those of you who are
so upset and offended that I am still around can sleep a little easier
at night knowing that Satan^H^H^H^H^HGeoman won't be screaming at you
for doing stupid things any longer.
-Steve
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@ciaranm.org> wrote:
> It is widely perceived that Gentoo has a huge problem with slacker
> archs cluttering up the tree and making maintainers' work harder.
> Clearly, something needs to be done about this.
<snip>
Wow, I almost don't know where to begin. The amount of FUD,
misinformation, and outright lies floating around all of this bullshit
is astounding. If you believe everything you've read from some
incessantly obsessive blogger and some extremely loud and misinformed
bug wrangler, you would believe that the mips team killed the baby
jesus, caused the plagues, invaded Europe, and invaded Iraq...all with
me as their supreme dictator. And yes, to you so impaired, that was
indeed sarcasm. It seems like many of you are under some sort of
warped impression that *I* am actively trying to hold back the tree,
with my sole reason to piss of ebuild maintainers. That is so
incredibly far from the truth as to be completely insane. So, let's try
to clear some of this up, shall we?
First of all, to you vivo, before you say something else you might
regret later, you should consider that mips *has* gotten help recently,
and said help is doing a very good job. The situation is only
improving. More on this later. And also, it is *not* my fault that
Diego quit. But if you want to keep loudly whining on the mailing list
here about how I'm "still around" (I'm not actually) and Diego is gone,
keep on going. More on this later too. You can say whatever you want
about me, I actually have thick skin, unlike certain other people,
however you are not making the situation any better. I suggest you
stop.
To t3h Harring and Mr. Parallel Grapefruit, I agree with you, Lies,
Damn Lies, and Statistics. Citing percentages is circling around the
point that Ciaran made. Some arch could only have 10 packages
keyworded out of the entire tree, with 3 of them being "slackers" as
defined here. This arch would lead your list by a wide margin. The
fact is, tree bloat is measured purely by the *absolute number* of
packages which are behind another arch.
All of that said, how about we clear up all of the misinformation about
how arch keywording really works, how deps get wrongly dropped, and then
explain why mips has generally fallen behind. This isn't an excuse,
but is merely a statement of facts which describe the situation.
First, the ~arch tree. This one is easy. In most cases, you can
merely compile test something against the ~arch tree, and then do a
fairly quick run test to make sure things seem to be working as they
should. If additional deps are required, they must be similarly
tested. Another rule of thumb is that if other arches already have
~arch keywords and there have been no bugs saying something like "this
is complete crap and shouldn't be in the tree", then you can have
fairly good assurance that you haven't missed any critical bugs (aside
from really really wacky arch specific stuff...more on this later).
Furthermore, ebuild maintainers are allowed (and encouraged) to carry
~arch keywords forward during version bumps.
How about the stable arch tree? This one is
trickier. In order to bump an ebuild into the stable tree, the arch
team has to be far more careful. Not only must this ebuild have been
in ~arch for 30 days without any bug reports, but it must have been
*extensively* tested against the current stable tree to ensure no
breakages. Furthermore, all required deps of said ebuild which are
also ~arch must be similarly tested. This is extremely tedious work
that requires a lot of time, both machine and developer. For those
arches where the best possible supported machines might be on par with
a pentium2 300mhz box, the machine time becomes almost ridiculous.
Now, consider the mips arch. As I insinuated above, the fastest of our
supported machines really isn't a speed demon. However, there is even
*more* complexity with mips. We support both big endian *and* little
endian configurations across *multiple* ABIs. This makes testing even
more difficult and tedious. I can only speak for myself, but I always
strived to make sure anything I ever keyworded worked on *both* our
standard 32-bit ABI, and the more experimental n32 (for simplicity, it
is a quasi 64-bit ABI with a lot of funkiness). The compile time
required for all this testing is ridiculous. It might take two weeks
or longer to get something very large compiled (accounting for compile
failures and other unforeseen stuff) on the machines I had available.
Other developers are similarly constrained by the speed of their
machines. Again, not an excuse, but just a fact of how things are. If
I had infinite time to work on Gentoo, this would not be an issue.
I fully admit that for pretty much the entire past year, I have not had
time to do any of this, so I have slacked, and is the reason that I
have ultimately retired. It seems like time constraints have similarly
affected the rest of the team, with a recent notable exception (yes,
there are more than just me...try reading mips.gentoo.org). In order
to try and get some help in the past, I have actively tried to donate
machines to developers, with lukewarm interest at best. But hey, if
nobody wants to work on mips, that's their decision. This is a
volunteer effort...you can do what you want.
How did this situation happen in the first place? Owing to the apparent
"slacking" of our team due to a mere lack of time to get useful stuff
done, we have not only fallen back in getting things keyworded, but
haven't had the resources to answer a multitude of "stable my apps" or
"keyword this new dep" bugs that have been filed by ebuild
maintainers. I submit that in many cases, said maintainers are filing
these bugs for little reason other than "I want a new version in the
tree, look at it, it's shiny". Thus, those tend to automatically get
pushed to the back of the line of importance. However, in many cases,
ebuild developers simply refuse to wait and drop old ebuilds, thus
breaking arch deps and creating more bugs.
Now, let us consider security bugs. These are extremely problematic,
but not because of the security issues. See, in Gentoo we have both
"security supported" and "security unsupported" arches. The supported
arches are required to have a security liaison who responds to security
bugs, and ensures that keywords are added to new, non-vulnerable
versions. In order to stay supported, they *must* do this. However,
the unsupported arches have absolutely no obligation to answer to these
bugs. Unsupported arches do not have a security liaison. And,
bluntly, unsupported arches are not at all required to do *anything*
about security bugs. Having something tested in said arches tree is
far more important than making sure all versions are totally secure.
Yet, ebuild maintainers have bordered on militant tactics to complain
to unsupported arches about security bugs. Basically, there is a huge
conflict of interest that is DEFINED BY POLICY. Yes, that's right, the
currently accepted policy automatically creates a conflict. In many
cases, instead of being patient, these maintainers simply drop the last
version of an ebuild with arch keywords for an unsupported arch, thus
breaking the tree, and wouldn't you know, creating even *more* bugs. I
suggest that if both arch teams and ebuild developers (especially
ebuild developers) think this sucks, then try to get the policy
changed. Until then, you will have to deal with it.
All of this has gotten us to the current situation, where ebuild
maintainers are really pissed off at the mips team, and where the mips
team is pissed off at ebuild developers for breaking our tree. This is
why I get so mad sometimes. Anyone knows me knows that I have
*consistently* screamed at people for breaking arch deps (rather than
just being an asshole because I'm retiring, as a certain group seems to
think). I would much rather have something that I know has been
tested in the tree, rather than expend unnecessary and unavailable
time to answer to every single security bug.
Considering all that I have said above, it was no surprise
that I got a bit irritated by bug #163795. However, I will say that I
merely started out by saying it would have been nice for Diego to
actually attempt to contact one of us on irc for a quick chat before
dropping mips from all of KDE. His notoriously short fuse caused that
discussion to rapidly proceed to all-out flame. Now, let's fast-forward
a bit to the incident over the weekend. I will preface this by saying
that recently the mips team has obtained a very good developer who has
been spending a ridiculous amount of time testing and closing bugs for
us. Eroyf has really saved us recently, and I hope he will continue to
keep doing a good job. He is spending a lot of time doing things the
RightWay(TM). If you don't remember from above, this means extensive
compile and run testing of things before adding keywords.
Well, eroyf decided he would like to work on KDE
keywording, which is his choice. This is open source volunteer work,
after all. Well, in attempting to compile kde-3.5.6, he ran into some
nasty compile errors that could not be easily resolved. Guess what?
That means 3.5.6 can not be keyworded on mips. Then, working exactly
as he was trained, he realized that 3.5.5 had no such problems, and
proceeded to do his extensive testing on that version for potential
addition to the ~mips tree. He made a passing comment about this on
irc, which was "overheard" by Diego. Instead of being constructive,
Diego resorted to outright preemptive harassing, which I believe to be a
direct result of sour grapes from bug #163795. I know it's hard for
those of you who believe that Diego's shit smells like roses, but he
was harassing an arch developer who was only trying to do his job
correctly. I took exception, so I screamed at Diego as I have many
other people during my time in Gentoo (yes, shocking as it may be, I
have called people twats and fuckheads without them quitting as a
result). Apparently that was just too much for him, so not only did he
quit, but he attempted to blackmail devrel into firing me instantly.
Perhaps, I should have been slightly less blunt with him, but I stand
by my comments. I do not feel I was wrong to tell him off for
harassing eroyf.
Now this is just my opinion and not fact, but Diego
was merely looking for an excuse to quit, so don't blame me. I didn't
force him to quit, he did that of his own free will. Anyone who knows
Diego knows that he has been talking of quitting for a long time now.
If not me, he would surely have found another excuse, but whatever.
What is done is done. I indeed have retired, so those of you who are
so upset and offended that I am still around can sleep a little easier
at night knowing that Satan^H^H^H^H^HGeoman won't be screaming at you
for doing stupid things any longer.
-Steve
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