Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

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

On 28/01/2014 14:37, Steven J. Long wrote:
> I concur that "QA should be focusing on making stable, actually stable,
> not more bleeding edge." That's not a "performance" issue as you put it,
> except in management nuspeek. It's the whole bloody point of the distro,
> in overarching terms: to test and stabilise robust ebuilds. That process
> is what leads to better software, not staying at the "bleeding-edge"
> and forgetting about robustness since "a new version is out."


+1

Nice to see a dev echo my sentiments almost word for word exactly.

9 years later I'm still here, still running Gentoo on all my hosts (over
10 at last count excluding VMs). Why? Because Gentoo
just.works.right.every.single.time, even on ~arch - and that is an
amazing accomplishment for an distro never mind a USE based one.

If I want bleeding edge I'll use funtoo or exherbo or unmask everything
-9999. If I want the latest new! improved! shiny! crap re-implemented
yet again and badly, there's Ubuntu or nightlies from rawhide.

The joy of Gentoo is that it works on just about anything. Stable
well-tested code continues to just work for the most part even on
slacker arches even if the ebuild is years old. When stable is just a
bit too stable for a specific case, we have overlays and
/usr/local/portage/cat/pkg.

This is why Gentoo works so well, because the weird arches still get to
play on the same playground with the other kids. I work at a carrier ISP
and you'd be pleasantly surprised to see just how many gentoo-powered
vendor POC blackboxes come through the office from vendors wanting to
sell their network magic. Business seems to have cottoned onto the idea
that gentoo let's you stop wasting time with make and rather fire off
emerge, doesn't matter what the silicon is.

Slow arches is the price for supporting everything out there. But so
what? If slow_arch_X is stuck on some old version of an @system package,
who cares? It's not like portage will pick it for an amd64 box. An old
ebuild is a file, it sits next to 178,477 files and does no harm, it
only gets used on hardware that needs it.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com