Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Proposal for how to handle stable ebuilds

[Jeroen Roovers <jer@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:26:51 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:

> > Words
> > like "production", "critical" and "important" can be applied as
> > easily to the state of a company's or nation's system as to a
> > single person's.

> Yes, but it's a relative thing.
>huge snip<

That's what I said, only in many more words and with a confusing "Yes,
but" at the start, as if you were complementing or correcting what I
said.

> IOW, I'd have agreed if the point was that it's a machine that's
> useful to the user and that he doesn't want broken, and we should
> behave accordingly, but the triple emphasis of important, production,
> critical, seemed a bit undue for the lengths to which an ordinary
> user goes or the priority he reveals by his own actions.  And if his
> actions reveal a SERIOUS priority in the area, than he's already
> covered by definition. That's all I was saying.

Um, you didn't say all of that. In fact you said none of that. You said:

> If it's a "production, critical, important" system, then what is one
> doing installing updates on it directly without verifying them on a
> generally identical test system first?

Users with only one Gentoo system to work with rely on ebuild
maintainers and arch teams to run the "generally identical test
systems" on their behalf (and respectively request and establish what
the stable branch is).

yoswink said this:

> Are you going to install in your stable (production, critial,
> important,...) system a combination of packages not tested before?

He takes "stable" to mean one of three things, or maybe even something
completely different ("...") that some user out there might take to mean
"stable"[1]. Then you rip some of the punctuation out and put these
words in his mouth:

> If it's a "production, critical, important" system,

going on to talk about the discrepancy between best practices in
*corporate* software deployment and ignoring Gentoo's stable branch.

You did it again in the "IOW" quotation above explaining it as a "triple
emphasis" instead of what it was intended to denote, namely as a few
possible examples of the meaning of "stability".


Kind regards,
     jer


[1] To which I responded by pointing to Gentoo's philosophical blurb.