Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo "stable" going in wrong direction ?

[Pieter Van den Abeele <pvdabeel@gentoo.org>]

Begin forgot to cc gentoo-dev message:

On Sunday, Dec 15, 2002, at 13:56 Europe/Brussels, Rainer Groesslinger 
wrote:

> For example Maik "blizzy" Schreiber told me about
> http://gentoo-stable.iq-computing.de which is something like a "voting
> system" but almost nobody is using it (for example mozilla 1.2.1 only 
> has
> one vote although many thousand people are using it - with success) 
> and if
> you take a look at the ebuild you see that every mozilla ebuild with 
> version
> 1.2.1 has the keyword ~x86 - so stable users don't get it although 
> there's
> no reason for calling Mozilla 1.2.1 "unstable"...

AFAIK gentoo-stable currently is in the process of  being integrated 
into gentoo.org (and into bugzilla?). gentoo-stable.iq-computing.de is 
not official. It is only open to public for testing and for comments 
(from mostly gentoo devs, maybe some users). It would probably be a bit 
too soon to have many thousands of people use a system that is still 
under heavy development. You should ask maik about this in person, 
cause I don't know everything about its current state. But I do know it 
will be officially announced on www.gentoo.org if it is ready for 
everyone.

> In my opinion http://gentoo-stable.iq-computing.de should be a 
> more-or-less
> official voting system for the packages or gentoo stable will end like
> debian stable and I don't think Gentoo wants to go *that* stable :)

gentoo-stable was needed for the following reason: we needed a 
mechanism to be able to track which (unstable) ebuilds users have 
installed/tested and run great (or crashed their system). (Right now 
lot of devs mark an ebuild with ~x86 ~ppc ~alpha ~sparc ~mips... and 
never receive input from users to inform them if an ebuild works great 
or doesn't. That's why gentoo-stable is being created.) but like I 
said, it still is in the development/testing/open for comments stage 
and is probably not production ready (again...you should ask maik)

> There are just not enough users and feedback pushing unstable packages 
> to
> stable from what I see...

it's not in production stage yet so there's no need to announce this 
officially to everyone yet. We want user input, but I can imagine Maik 
doesn't want a few thousand people reporting everything. We don't want 
to slashdot maik's server. (That doesn't mean that you can't have a 
look at it and send your comments to this list or even to maik if you 
find a bug). Again: ask maik about the development status, but I think 
it's not production ready yet and in testing stage.

> There was/is talk about package.mask being removed in the future - 
> good idea
> but I think it should look like this
>
> stable: KDE 3.0.5
> unstable: KDE3.1RC5
>
> stable: Mozilla 1.2.1
> unstable: Mozilla 1.3a
>
> and so on...In short: Gentoo stable should be as close as possible to 
> what
> the developers of the various applications call "stable" - why not 
> believe
> them ? ;p

It's not really the app only that should be called 'stable' before it 
can appear as stable in gentoo. If the ebuild is broken, or does some 
weird stuff (or just needs to be tested) a stable app can be called 
unstable.  Gentoo is a metadistribution, that means that instead of 
sending users applications in binary form we give users executable 
(readable) instructions to build the Gentoo binaries themselves. These 
instructions can be called unstable if they are only recently 
introduced into portage and need to be tested first. but otherwise the 
stable/unstable thing does follow what the developers call their 
application (unless we think what they say is incorrect (happens when 
users report that the application breaks)

> Currently the package.mask carries packages which have a right to be 
> called
> unstable, e.g. XFree 4.2.99 and so on...
> But the stable/unstable situation in some ebuilds is a bit confusing 
> and
> leading in the wrong direction if continued like this ?

Can you give an example of these ebuilds?

I know there are some apps which are called unstable by their 
developer, and stable by us. But this happens only after a long period 
of testing/running the app.

> Of course every distribution needs to test individual things, make some
> changes here and there...And to avoid a bad stable tree I highly 
> suggest
> using blizzy's system...

Maik will be glad to hear that. But keep in mind that the system is 
probably only up for testing and not yet in production.

> Just my opinion about current stable/unstable things...
> Rainer

Pieter

--
Pieter Van den Abeele
pvdabeel@gentoo.org - pvdabeel@vub.ac.be


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