How to handle upgrade of libnotify when cups-client-1.4.8 is marked as broken

[Michal Varga]

On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 15:30 -0400, Sahil Tandon wrote:

[...]
> Criminal?  Indifference?  This sort of troll-ish hyperbole is decidedly
> unhelpful.  I do agree that a note in UPDATING is appropriate.

[...]
> Ah, more trolling.

To contribute my random few cents to the debate (without actually
contributing anything of worth, so you don't really have to read it):

Replies like these already made me discard like 20 of my own emails in
the past, mid-write, exactly because of this expected outcome -
accusations of trolling, because, why not, that's really what it's all
about, right.

So to say for myself - I do not know Jerry, but I definitely share his
sentiments and even find his tone quite funnily (is that a word?)
appropriate, as the ports quality, over the last year, went totally,
horribly, down the drain.

On some of my desktop setups, I keep about 900-1000 installed ports (and
there are some ~200-300 for servers in general). There already seems not
to be a single week, even once, without some MAJOR breakage that always
takes hours (sometimes days) to track down and fix by my own (yes, even
stuff as simple as "hey, you should have known that you only need to
disable TLS and everything is fine again, duh" might take hours when
walking through 100s of steps upgrade process and ESPECIALLY when that
one particular breakage is combined with another, unrelated one. How
much I love those days).

And I know that every time I'd start writing a mail about it, my tone
would be exactly the same as Jerry chose. With the expected result of
"Zomg stop trolling", or for a change, the ever popular megahit "Patches
welcome" (yes, like that will help anyone now), without even bothering
to read what I'm really trying to complain about.

The fact is, that port breakages are already so LOVING common these days
that some people (like me) now take them as a regular daily routine. And
sooner or later, more of them will start cracking and going for the same
tone as Jerry did. On a weekly basis, again and again, there are port
updates being introduced with what seems to be absolutely no testing
whatsoever, some breakages take multiple takes on fixing by their
respective port maintainers, new versions of major dependencies get
introduced only to be rolled back few days later; using ports especially
for this last year feels like a rollercoaster ride without a seatbelt,
upside down, inside a volcano, wearing a parachute. And none of this is
PORTS issue itself. It's a quality control issue, or more like - the
horrible lack of it.

So, was really Jerry's tone so trollish?

I don't really think so. I'd simply consider him angry, as for myself, I
know how many such emails I personally didn't have nerves to send, and
would really, really love to. But somehow I feel, Jerry's is simply a
start and there is much more of this to see in the coming future...

m.


-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)