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

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

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