As you probably know I am using Gentoo hardened on stable flavor. Lately it led me to kind of thinking that in the main tree we have lots and lots of packages in testing only and people spam their /etc/portage/package.keywords* with various packages they need for their stable life.
I think we can somehow improve and YOU as users should do something about it by filling stabilisation requests. Mostly it is because developers only care about testing so bugs are fixed there, but nobody ever bothers to open the stabilisation bug. Resutls vary but one of visible ones is that we sometimes have packages that have last stabilisation in 2k9 even tho in testing there is last update this year.
This is often because bug gets only fixed by non-maintainer, qa, or just by somebody going around and fixing the issue for himself. This can lead to fixes landing to testing tree, but from then on nobody cares to propagate them properly for us puny folks in stable.
Easy way how to work around this is simple opening stable requests on packages you think you want. If maintainer is not responsive in 30 days (aka saying anything there) you as users can CC arch teams yourself (i suppose even one arch team only if you are unsure which ones is enough because they will cc the rest) and get the package into stable tree.
The stabilisation of non-maintainer packages often means more work for the AT/devs as you really should check the bugs and see if there are no crashes/patches around and try to apply them, I know you probably want to say that you don’t want to do anything more than changing the keywords but it improves the overall status :)
On the testing front I find it boring to search for user patches on bugzilla. I think we should do something like mailinglist where anyone can sent the patches and any developer could include those patches to main tree if he is using the package. This could speed up user inclusions a lot and also if something important for someone is not included once, he can sent the mail again.
Libreoffice
The 3.5.1 is closing by to arrive tomorow for you guys. This version should be for general consumption so lets see if we can stabilise it as I would really like to get rid of nsplugin and password bugs that are present in 3.4.5. Also for 3.4 series there is 3.4.6 en-route in next 14 days, but it won’t bring up much fixes.
Sorry for slightly off-topic, but what to do for the opposite situation – if a package in tree is totally broken for a long time, with a fix available?
This package does not even start for over a year, but all it needs is a simple bump:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/342321
Well thats why I wanted that ml with patches, as it would be easy to notice :)
If you take look the package it is maintained by tester. His activity is bit lacking in last 6months +-.
From looking on the ebuild it is bit messy so it needs complete overhaul. So if you are willing to play with it just drop me a mail and i can help you with it.
Ok I looked into it a bit:
http://dev.gentooexperimental.org/~scarabeus/insight-6.8.1.ebuild
The problem now is this bug:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407107
so it does not pass compile phase now, when it gets fixed it needs few touchups in install phase and it will be ready.
And it is now in CVS so test and report bugs.
Seems that your proposal doesn’t work: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401217
Seems like some developers ignore everything. That is the largest problem with Gentoo, not the code, but the people.
Anyway maintainer timeout used to be 30 days unless something changed. Even if they would just have to add some bugs why it can’t go stable or something like that. But whatever the maintainer want.
Try to do it more and lets see how much the maintainers complain. After all this just show up that they don’t give a f*ck to state any reason why it can’t go stable in 30 days, they just say that YOU can’t make it stable :)
That would be great, there are lots of stuff that we as users would see stable. But, instead of filling bugs over and over (yeah, there are duplicates for that) why couldn’t we, with developers of course, set a date – like a Stabilization Party (I know, this sounds like one of those *buntu things :D) – once a month for example, and have a good list of packages to start with?
There are surely a lot of users out there that want to contribute, and could be a nice way to involve them…
Well the idea sounds sane, so try to propose it on gentoo-dev mailinglist to see what the devs think about it.
Thanks. I’ve posted a summary in the new Gentoo wiki, “KEYWORDS” page
And what about packages like tuxonice-sources? amd64 stable version is more or less up-to-date (3.0.17), but x86 is pretty old (2.6.38) and it was stabilized 6 months later than amd64. I think there should a number of people who use it successfully, why not go stable?
It is mostly on arch teams and bugs in bugzilla, sometimes maintainer even do not care to stable it on some architectures because it is unreliable…
As I can see the bug is in bugzilla for 2 months now.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400703
Try to get some arch team member to look on it on irc, I really dunno, I can’t stable kernel I do not use :)