On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 09:20 +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> > That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> > "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> > the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
> 
> I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
> starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
> behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:
> Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)
broken, unstable, no good
(memleaks and horrible performance on a substantial amount of
systems ...)

> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)
~40 bugs open as Chris said. No go.

> Xorg 7: 5 months
I don't know the status on this one, but I guess it's going to be done
when it's done

Also GCC 4.x - all others are using it, right?
Well ... 4.0 was a mess, 4.1 is looking good and should be available
soon - when everything compiles with it.

> I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
> we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
> KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct. 
> You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
> probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
> things to go?
No, but if the new version is buggy it's not going to be unmasked just
because upstream would prefer that.

> I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
> bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
> is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
> in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
So go ~x86 all the way ... it's been good enough for me for ~2 years now

I understand your frustration, I'd like Gentoo to be more "bleeding
edge" as it used to be, but then I have an install that was originally
1.2 (I think, might have been 1.4rc) that was updated and recompiled
every now and then - that's really awesome, I don't know of any other
distro that offers such good migration paths.

Just my 2 cents,

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move