[oe] Cleanup / janitors

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

2010/2/16 Koen Kooi <k.kooi at student.utwente.nl>:
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> On 16-02-10 00:38, Chris Larson wrote:
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> Per discussion in the TSC meeting this month, I'm sending out this email as
>> a probe.  Would anyone on the list benefit from a "janitors" type project,
>> to outline and document specific cleanup tasks and how they should be done?
>> There are many tasks that need doing which involve editing of large amounts
>> of files in relatively simple ways, and I suspect, but am not yet certain,
>> that there are a group of individuals who wish to contribute to the project,
>> but are new enough that they don't feel confident diving into anything
>> invasive.  This sort of a task could be a starting point for that sort of
>> individual.  Thoughts?  Anyone out there in that camp currently that would
>> benefit from something like this?
>
> The first project that comes to mind is converting simple recipes (e.g.
> not perl) to new style staging. It's a fairly simple job that has a huge
> impact.

Problem is to do that reliable.
It is easy to remove the do_stage section from a recipe, and it is
easy to verify that it builds, but it is already becoming less trivial
to verify that everything that depends on it builds too, and it
becomes complicated if you want to verify that it actually works
(especially if you have no clue what the package does).
(btw actually when trying to build dependend packages you should
either use packaged staging or remove your work dir).

I don't mind spending an hour or so removing some do_stage things, and
I don't mind if my computer hums along a night or so to compile those
packages, but I'd rather not burn my fingers and get blamed for
breaking things outside my control & competenence.

The other thing that comes to mind is better describing the job. If it
indeed is only removing do_stage it is probably better done by someone
with commit access, otherwise someone else has to spend the same
amount of time to apply the patch, remove it from patchwork etc.

Frans