Summary of Gentoo council meeting 9 April 2013

Agenda
======
1. Introduction and roll call

2. Change to newer Bash version in ebuilds

   Take an initial look, and possibly vote on switching to a newer
   Bash version (e.g. 4.2) for the next EAPI [1,2].

3. EAPI deprecation

   Should we have stricter rules, in order to limit the number of
   EAPIs that are in active usage? [3]

4. Open bugs with council involvement

     - Bug 457000 "Missing log and summary for 20090122 and 20090625
       council meetings"
     - Bug 464250 "Encourage developers to use the latest EAPI"

5. Open floor

A proposal to add another agenda topic "Patch policy" did not pass.


Roll call
=========
Present: chainsaw, dberkholz, grobian, scarabeus, ulm, williamh
Absent: betelgeuse

Change to newer Bash version in ebuilds
=======================================
Several options were discussed:
- Change of bash version to 4.2 could be a regular item for EAPI 6.
- The bash update could be put into its own EAPI, to appear at least
  one year after the date (2012-07-01) of EAPI parsing being supported
  by stable portage.
- Updating the bash version could be a problem for bootstrapping on
  some Prefix architectures (e.g., Solaris). According to grobian, it
  should be possible to handle the issue.

No action is taken for now.

EAPI deprecation
================
In the discussion, there was neither consensus if EAPI 0 should be
considered deprecated, nor what should be the oldest EAPI that still
needs to be supported for the upgrade path of users' system.

Three votes were taken:
- "EAPIs 0 to 2 are no longer required for the upgrade path of users'
  systems."
  Accepted unanimously.

- "EAPIs 1 and 2 are discouraged. Repoman should warn about this."
  Accepted unanimously.

- Change wording in the first question from "0 to 2" to "0 to 3".
  Tie vote (3 yes, 3 no), therefore the motion did not pass.

Open bugs with council involvement
==================================
- Bug 457000 "Missing log and summary for 20090122 and 20090625
  council meetings"
  No progress since last meeting.

- Bug 464250 "Encourage developers to use the latest EAPI"
  Accepted in 2011-03-08 meeting, but not in the devmanual yet.
  Action: grobian will prepare a patch.

- Bug 447566 "x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-{173.14.36,304.64,310.19}
  fails to build with kernel {3.7,3.8}"
  Short status update from Zero_Chaos. Discussion will be per e-mail.

Open floor
==========
- Q: Was the dodocs/edocs proposal [4] voted upon?
  A: There was no vote on any EAPI 6 features yet.

- Gentoo participates in the Google Summer of Code, for the 8th year.

- Further discussion about EAPI deprecation.

- Sub-slots and slot operators are overused, and used in the wrong way
  in some packages, in spite of the feature being well documented.

Next meeting date
=================
14 May 2013, 19:00 UTC


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2371
[2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/431340
[3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2377
[4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/459692