Policy Request: Restoring breakage quickly and/or Grandfathering of old versions

[ahundt]

Related to #60, I'm requesting a policy that allows breakage to be restored to a working state quickly and efficiently.

This is essentially a feature request that is "procedural", "policy" in nature but perhaps it could be resolved with changes to the "unit test" code.

When dependencies break other packages, I try to contribute usefully and submit pull requests simply restoring the previous functionality, such as with a pull request somewhere like homebrew-versions. However, that seems to require code go through the full vetting process as if it were brand new. Perhaps the code was previously grandfathered in to stricter coding policies before which doesn't apply to code being moved between package repos? Perhaps there is an approach unrelated to what I just mentioned that could help fix quickly, prevent, or restore changes that caused breakage?

As mentioned in #60 that would of course have to be something the homebrew team is willing to put into practice and I understand if it is out of scope with respect to your current plans.

Thanks again for your time and consideration!

[tdsmith]

I appreciate this is frustrating; you're caught in the middle of an unsettled administrative question, which is why you're hearing more than one thing. In general, code from homebrew-science probably should not land in homebrew-versions. If the -science maintainers are unwilling to maintain it, you can consider maintaining it on your own in a tap.

I do not think we're likely to see something actionable arise here because this is an unusual circumstance involving different code standard cultures in -science and the other core taps, so I'm going to go ahead and close this ticket and refer you back to the homebrew-science maintainers for questions about vtk.

[tdsmith]

fyi @dpo @Homebrew/science