Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb <purslow@sympatico.ca>]

060504 Michael Kirkland wrote:
> I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap
> the Debian project has been mired in forever.
> "arch" and "~arch" are polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date"
> and "maybe it will work".  This leads to people trying to maintain
> a frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file,
> constantly adding to it & never knowing when things can be removed from it.

That's very much my own impression.  I am now using ~x86 versions of
Vim Vim-core Gvim Cdargs Openoffice Eix Euses Gqview Gwenview Portage
Firefox Galeon Htop KDE -- all of which which I use regularly -- 
& Abiword Gnumeric Koffice Gnugo Qgo Qalculate-kde (which I rarely use).
I have had no problem with any of them.

My solution is a line in  .bashrc :
  'alias emergeu='ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge' ,
which allows me to emerge a testing version on a specific occasion.
The  package.keywords  alternative is silly,
as there's no reason anyone would want to do it regularly for a package,
as opposed to occasionally when -- increasingly -- stabilisation is late.

I do a weekly 'eix-sync' & check the list of packages which have changed,
then decide which ones to update; I never do 'emerge world'.
I keep an upto-date file with a line for each package I have installed,
incl date, version & the main dependencies it satisfies (if any):
this is my alternative to 'world', which is clumsy & causes problems.

I have been doing this since I started using Gentoo in Oct 2003
& have never had any problem with Portage or packages as a result.

> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag,
> where things can be moved to from "~arch"
> when they work for reasonable configuration values,
> but still have open bugs for some people.

I suggested this earlier, but got only nonsense for a reply.

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