Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts?

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 28 Jul 2017 12:44:20 +0200 Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 25. Juli 2017, 01:22:44 CEST schrieb Peter Stuge:
> > 
> > I hold a perhaps radical view: I would like to simply remove stable.
> > 
> > I continue to feel that maintaining two worlds (stable+unstable)
> > carries with it an unneccessary cost.
> > 
> 
> That's not feasible. It would kill off any semi-professional or professional 
> Gentoo use, where a minimum of stability is required. 
> 
> (Try keeping ~10 machines on stable running without automation. That's already 
> quite some work. Now try the same with ~arch. Now imagine you're talking about 
> 100 or 1000 machines.)
 
~50 hosts here on ~arch. Stable vs unstable is not an issue for
production. The main problem (at least in my case) is upgrade path,
especially with hosts not that often updated.

Upgrade of Gentoo-based production hosts takes considerable time,
not just due to compilation time and issues, but due to the need to
update dozens (sometimes hundreds) of config files properly and
this process can't be fully automated.

Another problem is short support time: only update path for systems
up to one year old is supported more or less. IRL even half year
old system may be PITA for a full update. To make it worse there
are cases when people deliberately make such updates harder: some
developers are refusing to set minimal version requirements for
dependencies if dependency versions below minimal were below latest
stable 1 year age. While such behaviour is within established
policies I frankly do not understand such devs: having
>=cat/foo-1.2.3 instead of cat/foo doesn't hurt, but makes life of
fellow users much easier.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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