Dear developers, TL;DR: Unless arch teams decide to help us, the Python team will stop supporting non-x86 arches and start dropping non-x86 keywords from reverse dependencies.
Python team is struggling with a large number of keywordreqs and stablereqs. It is common for new versions of Python packages to bring new dependencies, and it is uncommon for arch teams to handle our requests in time. The situation is particularly bad on arm64 which seems to have initially stabilized a lot of packages but afterwards can't manage to stabilize new versions. Even with the recent effort of NeddySeagoon, it is still common for me to open new stablereqs while the old ones are waiting for arm64. Overall, arm64 ends up staying behind with dependencies as well which makes each new stablereq more and more effort. However, all non-x86 arches are bad. Making keywordreqs takes tremendous effort, and keeping them up-to-date with frequent package releases is simply impossible. It is quite frustrating when a keyword request is open for a month, then some arch tester points out that the package list is outdated, you spend even more effort updating it, then you wait again and the same situation repeats. In the end, we've reached the point where very high profile packages such as dev-python/virtualenv are missing almost all keywords. To be honest, I don't want to spend another hour trying to update package list, so that *maybe* some arch team will finally consider helping us. For this reason, I propose that the Python team officially stops supporting non-x86 arches. For obvious reasons we will have to continue keeping Portage and the most basic packages work but we will not put any special effort to restore lost keywords, and we will drop keywords from low-profile packages as their dependencies are not keyworded. I am thoroughly frustrated by this state of affairs, and I'm having a serious trouble motivating myself to do anything about it. FWICS others have abandoned the ship earlier. I will probably try to prepare some script to determine where we need to drop keywords, for a start. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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