* [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy
@ 2014-01-15 23:13 99% ` Duncan
0 siblings, 0 replies; 1+ results
From: Duncan @ 2014-01-15 23:13 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
Michael Orlitzky posted on Tue, 14 Jan 2014 19:50:30 -0500 as excerpted:
> As I mentioned in a reply to William, right now I can decide when stuff
> is broken and keyword the newer versions. The proposal is to force me
> onto the new versions, which is strictly worse from my perspective.
Force??
As I discovered when gentoo/kde "forced" me into taking semantic-desktop
up the <beep> with early kde 4.11, there's rather less "force" on gentoo
than many realize, certainly as long as upstream is still supporting the
options, anyway, one of the reasons I run gentoo.[1] =:^)
Every once in awhile I drag an ebuild out of /var/db/pkg/ to put in my
overlay, because the ~arch I normally run has moved on and my current
version is gone, but the new version is broken (or simply hugely changed
and I don't have time to reconfigure ATM), while the stab?le version is
just that, stale.
Of course the kde-sunset overlay is perhaps the ultimate example of that.
Yes, ultimately there will eventually be some "forcing" as in-tree deps
change and keeping the old/overlaid version building and running becomes
more of an issue over time, but it'll be a gradual process over a number
of years, and the gentooer remains free to pick his pain point and do the
migration in his own time, which at minimum, makes it a substantially
softer "force" than would be the case on /most/ distributions.
---
[1] In the kde/semantic-desktop case, I diffed package versions with and
without the flag and figured out which changes were related to it and
which not, creating my own ebuild patches, which I dropped in a tree
under /etc/portage/patches.ebuild/, similar to the /etc/portage/patches/
tree. I then hacked up a script to apply those ebuild patches and re-
manifest, and added that step to my sync-script. This was all possible,
and actually surprisingly easy, because (1) upstream kde still supports
the configure options and AFAIK intends to thru all of kde4, and (2)
gentoo/kde had the options available at one point, so all I had to do was
diff the before and after, and reverse the effect, hard-coding the flag
off, where gentoo/kde was was effectively hard-coding it on.
Fortunately, before 4.11 went stable, gentoo/kde decided to keep the
flags after all, and reintroduced them. So I didn't have to carry my own
patches for as long as I had feared I might. But regardless, their
"forcing" semantic-desktop on ~arch and overlay users didn't "force" /me/
to take it, because I'm an empowered gentooer and one way or another I
wasn't taking any such "forcing"! There efforts underway to do a user-
controlled kde-sunset overlay thing, possibly calling it kde-lite, too,
thus spreading the work around a bit, but fortunately that ultimately
wasn't needed. And if it had come to it, I was beginning to look at
other desktops too, as I had tried it previously and was done with kde
with semantic-desktop, period, but fortunately that migration didn't have
to happen either. =:^)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
^ permalink raw reply [relevance 99%]
Results 1-1 of 1 | reverse | options above
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2014-01-14 21:37 [gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy William Hubbs
2014-01-14 21:57 ` Michael Orlitzky
2014-01-14 22:33 ` William Hubbs
2014-01-14 22:43 ` Michael Orlitzky
2014-01-15 0:13 ` Tom Wijsman
2014-01-15 0:50 ` Michael Orlitzky
2014-01-15 23:13 99% ` [gentoo-dev] " Duncan
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