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An outage story and the pre-release

So, it’s no more a mystery for anyone that KDE has developers eyes only releases the week before the release of the real thing. In Gentoo, we usually put the ebuilds for those pre-releases under package.mask so that developers can actually test them and help finding problems. Last time, I had to skip this because I entered the release task at the end, when the true tarballs were released already, since I didn’t have access to the pre-releases anyway.

Now, for this release, I was all set and ready, with access to the server, to kde-packager and in general knowing that a new release was coming of which I would be the one preparing the ebuilds. As also Dan did, I put the tarballs on dev.gentoo.org in SSH for devs to access, and mailed to gentoo-core the instructions to access them, and the mandatory rule of destroying the tarballs after release to avoid messing up digests.

Unfortunately, seems like this favour I do to the fellow devs is something I shouldn’t do anymore, so next time I won’t repeat it and just leave the ebuild to be committed. Why? Because of a stupid domino effect.

First, one distribution (that I won’t name, but you can guess it: it was/is one of the main contributors to KDE) seems to like screwing up with others’ minds and released the pre-release tarballs to the public. Why? No clue, but I would suspect that “no clue by their side” is an answer as good as any other.

Then, someone goes naming this and the related URL on #gentoo-dev . Could have been a worse way of action? Probably just mailing the gentoo-ricers list.

Now, I’m waiting to see what happens. If I get one, a single one report for the pre-release, the two people blatantly talking about that, also happy, smiling doing so, are going in my eternal block list. Am I drastic? Insensible? Probably. But if they screw up release plans in such a stupid way, then they really won’t be pleased to deal with me anymore. If nobody have seen me really pissed off before, this would do. Especially since I didn’t read a “sorry, I didn’t thought of it” about the whole thing yet.

So, if anybody from KDE wants to blame someone, you can blame the above distribution and ask me for the two here to blame. No I’m not kidding, if you ask me, I’ll tell you (if you’re from KDE of course).

Sigh, good way to wake up after sleeping the afternoon because of passing the night committing, really damn good way.

Update: I’m told that the 4-letter above-mentioned distribution removed the tarballs from FTP. Still the point remains, that if something goes wrong, my block list is there, empty (for what concern Gentoo) and ready.

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