RE: [gentoo-dev] making %95 of users happy

[Fuper <futurist@directvinternet.com>]

On Fri, 2002-04-19 at 07:04, Todd Wright wrote:
> > > > And to the person (Andrew I think) who quoted the following 
> > from the gentoo site as a reason for not having release branches...
> > > > 
> > > > "*Portage allows you to set up Gentoo Linux the way you like it*..."
> > > > 
> > > > It doesnt. Just when I get it how I like it, it changes.
> > 
> > "IT changes"??  I'm at a loss here.  You mean that YOU keep telling it
> > to change?  <wink>  I think that you missed Daniel Robbins point:
> 
> Perhaps this will work itself out all by itself.
> When Gentoo 1.2 is released and the make.profile is changed to point at the default-1.2 profile
> the bleeding edgers can use that while the more conservative keep their link to 1.0  
> Thinking about it, this is probably the ultimate solution, 
> its just not apparent right now since Gentoo is so young, and the only
> available option is to use the 1.0 profile. When there is a choice,
> the current version profile will be bleeding edge, while the previous
> version will only be updated with major fixes, and will become the 
> "stable" release.
> 
> There. I've just convinced myself. This is a temporary problem that solves itself as Gentoo matures.

You've convinced me too.

I think that some of the concerns and proposals reflect a belief that
Gentoo keeps changing and therefore can not survive.  That has been
Microsoft's argument against Linux itself.  My argument is that by
extending our control loop back further in the process, all the way back
to the source codes, we have created an inherently stable system (there
will be perturbations but we will always recover).  The alternative
being proposed is like the formalizations of the Debian release
procedure, and notice that Debian is having a hard time getting a stable
release of Woody (and that Woody still uses the 2.2 kernel by default).