[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem <bart.braem@gmail.com>]

Michael Kirkland wrote:

> I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the
> Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are
> polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will
> work".
> 
> This leads to people trying to maintain a
> frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it
> and never knowing when things can be removed from it.
> 
> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to
> from "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still
> have open bugs for some people.
> 
> That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.

I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:
Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)
KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)
Xorg 7: 5 months
I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct. 
You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
things to go?
I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
One nice thing for users would be the addition of more metabugs for recent
packages. I'd like to know why some packages are not stable, and I am not
the only one. Adding a metabug instead of closing all requests for
stabilization with wontfix/wontresolve is much more userfriendly.

Once again, I love to use Gentoo but I don't understand the current
situation. I have the feeling that I'm not the only user so I posted these
comments in order to discuss them. Hopefully you don't mind trying to
explain it all...

Bart

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