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

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Tom Wijsman posted on Fri, 24 Jan 2014 19:26:41 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 10:46:06 +0000 "Steven J. Long"
> <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Tom Wijsman wrote:
>> > "Steven J. Long" wrote:
>> > > What? Without a stable tree, Gentoo is useless afaic.
>> > 
>> > It moves us closer to upstream releases, a little more bleeding edge;
>> > a lot of users and developers run that already, it is found to be
>> > useful.
>> 
>> What? More vague. As are many of your philosophical statements in later
>> and prior mails, so I'll ignore those.
> 
> It is reality; and thus, without a stable tree, Gentoo is still useful
> for a lot of users and developers. What is vague about that?

[TL;DR readers may simply skip this one entirely. =:^) ]

Indeed.  While I recognize that in free software people scratch their own 
itches to a large extent, and thus that for some gentoo devs, they'd not 
be gentoo devs or contributing at all if there wasn't a stable tree for 
them to ultimately contribute to, and thus don't begrudge them all the 
time and effort they spend on stabilizing things, at the same time...

Being a ~arch and sometimes live-build/overlay user since I switched to 
gentoo now a decade ago[1], in part because my previous distro of choice 
(Mandrake) fell three kde releases (3.x.y, so it'd be 90 days behind with 
kde's current monthly micro-release schedule, tho IIRC it was a bit 
slower back then) behind, even for their beta/cooker release...

I've often wondered just how much faster gentoo could move, and how much 
better we could keep up with upstream, if we weren't so focused on 30+day 
outdated stab?l3 bumping all the time.  All that effort... from my 
viewpoint going to waste on something that gentoo really isn't going to 
be that great at anyway, certainly in comparison to other distros which 
REALLY provide a stab?le service, up to a /decade/ outdated, supporting 
often trailing edge software, in an effort to slow down progress for 
people that don't want to move so fast.

There's simply no way gentoo's going to compete well with either the 
commercial enterprise distros like RHEL and SLED/SLES, nor are we going 
to compete well with Debian stable.  That's not gentoo's strength, and 
from a certain viewpoint, any effort sunk into that is simply sunk.  How 
much better could gentoo be for those where the /real/ action is, at 
upstream release or even live-development versions, if all that effort 
wasn't being sunk into useless trailing edge stuff that we never have a 
chance of out-supporting other distros with anyway?

Tho as I said, I realize that FLOSS is very much a scratch your own itch 
thing in many cases, particularly for a community distro such as gentoo, 
and that for a lot of arch-dev folks, if arch-stable wasn't there for 
them to work on, those folks simply wouldn't be working on gentoo at all, 
but on other distros or even out of FLOSS entirely, so it's very much 
*NOT* a zero-sum game, and I can't begrudge them all the work they put 
into making gentoo the best it can be for their particular stable-arch 
itch, either.  So I appreciate that they're there and the work that they 
do, expanding gentoo's practical reach, even if it's not something I'm 
likely to be using or even particularly interested in any time soon.

My point being... yes indeed, there's a LOT of folks for whom gentoo 
without a stable tree would be a gentoo freed of a to-them useless 
weight, allowing gentoo to move even faster, and be even better in areas 
that are already its strength, heavily automated leading edge releases 
and live-development level packages.  And I'm one of those folks!

But that doesn't mean that I consider gentoo's stable tree entirely 
useless, even if in practice it is so for me, because I /do/ recognize 
it's not a zero-sum game -- killing the stable trees wouldn't get us 
/that/ much more work on the leading edge stuff, as most of that present 
contribution would simply go away.  At best, I'd guess we'd get /maybe/ 
20% of it, likely half that.  And we'd shrink as a distro and lose a lot 
of donated services, etc, as well, so what /might/ be a 10% gain in 
leading edge contribution could well actually end up being an overall 
loss, too.

But certainly, in a thought experiment, gentoo without the stable tree 
would be at least as useful as it is now, for some of us, were it not for 
the practical effect I mention above.

---
[1] I remember that I tried with 2004.0, but didn't actually get switched 
until 2004.1, thus... early 2014.... almost exactly a decade ago now, 
depending on whether you count from when I started trying or when I 
finally got a functional and complete install.

-- 
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