Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: stabilization policies

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 21/08/2013 03:54, Doug Goldstein wrote:
> Its also precisely that mix and match that might cause instability due
> to people not testing things. Case in point QEMU 1.6.0 just came out and
> it went through a number of release candidates but no one ever saw that
> it depends only on Python 2.4 but actually needs Python 2.6. That's kind
> of like Gentoo, a package says it depends on libfoo 1.0 or higher and
> the dev that tested stable baz 0.8 confirmed it worked with libfoo 1.0,
> but baz 0.9 in ~arch still depends on libfoo 1.0 but really needs libfoo
> 1.1 and libfoo 1.1 is ~arch as well. So the developer running ~arch
> believed that baz 0.9 works fine since he has ~arch libfoo.
> 
> My point is what Gentoo calls "stable" is just something that usually 2
> or more people have compiled and installed vs ~arch which 1 or more
> people have compiled and installed.
> 

+1

I think comparisons with the RHELs of this world to find what stable
means are invalid. Gentoo does not play in RHELs space, and anyone who
tries to deploy Gentoo where RHEL is a good fit is somewhat of a fool
[Aside: I'm a huge Gentoo fan, all my personal machines are Gentoo or
FreeBSD and yet I have banned Gentoo outright at work: juniors cause me
too much headaches, and Centos fixed all of that]

Gentoo simply cannot offer the same guarantees about stable that RHEL
can, mostly for reasons of manpower. The best we can do is to state that
we are confident stuff works pretty much mostly OK and doesn't break for
everyone, so the user can now do their own tests and decide.

Let's also keep in mind that Gentoo is a meta-distribution - it lets you
build your own distro. So all the heavy QA lifting that RHEL does for
you, you now have to do yourself (that role bumps one run down the
ladder). The classic meaning of "stable" just doesn't quite fit in that
scenario.

And, a truly stable mission-critical system is one that has all the
required features and emerge is never run again except for bug and
security fixes. A rolling release will never be truly "stable"

What I'm saying is let's not set the bar for stable too high. Our
targeted userbase is somewhat unique in the world.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com