Stable request

This article describes the procedure for moving an ebuild from testing to stable.

Responsibility
The primary purpose of the stabilization process is to integrate a testing ebuild into the Official Gentoo ebuild repository. This can involve maintaining the consistency of the dependency graph, basic compatibility checks with other packages, and smoke testing of the package itself.

Stabilization is not intended to relieve a package maintainer of their responsibility to ship a quality package - the primary responsibility of ensuring that a package is a good stable candidate remains with the person approving the stabilization request. The stabilization process does not include more than basic functionality checks unless explicitly requested.

Requesting stabilization
Ordinary users can request stabilization, too.

To request stabilization of a package, file a new bug under the  component taking care to complete two special bug fields:


 * - a fully qualified package per line, optionally followed by a space-delimited list of architectures to target. If no architecture list is provided, all architectures in  are assumed. Formerly, this field was called   and contained fully qualified atoms, which is also still supported.
 * - indicates if additional runtime testing is should be performed beyond build and tests passing. If undefined the arch tester should use their best judgement

Examples:

If a large number of atoms are being stabilized at once, it might be preferred to use an attachment to list the atoms instead of the field. In that case, set the flag attachments so that  is set to. If multiple active attachments are flagged they will all be considered, so remove the flag from or mark as obsolete old attachments. If both the atoms field is completed and an attachment is flagged, only the atoms field is considered.

Periodically a bot will review stabilization requests for completeness and complain if there are invalid or missing atoms, setting a  or   flag as appropriate. This allows arch team members to filter out requests that are not known-good if they wish. A series of architecture-specific saved searches are available for convenience.