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

["Rainer Groesslinger" <rainer.groesslinger@gmx.net>]

Hello,

I have been looking around for sime time in various ebuilds since Gentoo
introduced the "stable" and "testing/unstable" feature...

Well, in general I think it is a very good idea but I don't think it is used
as it should be !

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"...

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 :)

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

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

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 ?

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

I didn't know of it, he just told me some minutes ago and I think it's a
great chance for people to vote for it etc. - if it's used and developers
set their ebuilds as 'stable' according to what people voted (or not)...


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



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