> As you all know, Gentoo supports many various arches, in various degrees
> (stable, dev, exp). Let me explain those 3 statuses fast:
> 
> * stable arch - meaning we have stable profile for this arch, and stable
> keywords across base-system + varying degree of seriousness. We stable
> stuff after ~30 days in tree, and are mostly happy. For example the well
> known and common amd64 arch.
> 
> * dev arch - meaning we have complete dep-tree (no broken dep-trees),
> but no stable profile. If you break here a package (for example
> introduce new dep, previously unkeyworded) you are expected to dekeyword
> and ask for rekeywording. For example the nearly unknown arch s390.
> 
> * exp arch - meaning we support what we support, with possible broken
> dep-tree. This is the "scary" state of arch, since it can break at any
> moment. For example the noisy (because of the physical fans) arch alpha.

This classification is good enough for practical purposes (and for the
discussion of the status of architectures) but technically not correct.

I'll try to clarify below, but mostly to clean up confusion about wording.

You have to keep apart two things, A) architecture status, and B) profile
status, which are formally independent of each other.

A) architecture status, defined in profiles/arches.desc

A.1) stable
amd64, arm, arm64, hppa, ppc, ppc64, sparc, x86
Architectures that have a stable keyword and where packages undergo stabilization.

A.2) transitional
(currently none)
Architectures that have a stable keyword and where packages undergo stabilization, 
but the dependency tree is only consistent for ~arch.
This is useful for upgrading architectures to stable.

A.3) testing
all other
Architectures that only have testing, ~arch keywords

B) profile status, defined in profiles/profiles.desc

B.1) stable
The dependency tree is checked and enforced by the CI and by pkgcheck by default.
Unsatisfied dependencies etc generate errors and "break the tree".

B.2) dev
The dependency tree is checked by the CI and by pkgcheck (by default).
Unsatisfied dependencies etc generate warnings.

B.3) exp
No checking (by default)

Many combinations of these two properties exist. For example, 

amd64:
is A.1 and has many B.1 profiles (but also some B.2 and B.3)

loong:
is A.3 and has B.1, B.2, B.3 profiles

m68k:
is A.3 and has only B.3 profiles



-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)