On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 22:00:52 +0200 Alan McKinnon wrote: > As a long time user and citizen of -user I can tell you what the > general feeling of arch vs ~arch there is: Thanks for jumping into the discussion. > arch has plenty old stuff in it Yes, it keeps me from using it; I would have to unmask too much... > ~arch is plenty good enough for everything except very mission > critical stuff > > ~arch does not break every other day, and breakage is actually > surprisingly rare. And, it's usually confined to > openrc/udev/systemd/baselayout and other critical packages where one > just knows upfront anyway that danger may lurk ahead. > > Some folks like me sync daily and accept that I deal with occasional > breakage maybe once a month. Usually I just mask an offending package > and move on. Others wait a few days and if no reported bugs, then > emerge it. This really sounds like what would be the description of stable; I mean, for mission critical stuff someone would plan out a migration and "test" the upgrade prior to applying it to the server. For the rest, except for maybe that critical packages shouldn't break; an issue once a month is something that slips through, eg. see the stable bugs... > I get the sense that hard masked and -9999 is the new testing, Actually, hard masked is usually something that is really broken; while there are some things masked for some other reasons, you can't really regard it as testing. But yeah, as for -9999, it could be considered testing; although it is often broken, because of broken patches, ... > I also get the sense that arch progresses too slowly for many people. +1 that's one of the points that came up on IRC; 30 days and more being too long, because not everyone follows up with that time schedule (we are people, not cronjobs), it even gets a bit longer... > How long did we wait for MySQL-5.5 to reach arch? Folk wanted that > one in stable reasonably early and mixing arch/~arch is very very bad > in real life. Hence the recommendation to switch to ~arch, and it > usually works out just fine. Yes, but we don't want to end up having everyone having mixed trees or be on ~arch; if we do, stabilization is going to become a wasted effort. -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : TomWij@gentoo.org GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D