Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Plan, then communicate

[John Lawles <jl.050877@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 09:42:21PM -0500, Richard Freeman wrote:
> how will a separate portage tree for devs be any different from
> what we already have (masking and keywording),

     Those don't help when it is the 'stable' part of the tree that
breaks.  The most exasperating problems that I can remember
involved basic libraries that were changed (upgraded or removed) in
the "stable" tree and that change, in turn, exposed broken
dependencies or some such elsewhere.  IIRC, libexpat was an example
of that and you can see the level of end-user frustration in a
thread such as:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-575655-highlight-libexpat.html

> and how will we prevent users getting hit with even worse bugs
> because nobody is bothering to test anything in the environment
> that end-users actually use?

     The concept is that there would be a separate team maintaining
the stable tree.  A precedent for this would be the Linux kernel's
two-track development.

     I use my own mini-two-tree system.  I emerge --sync and then
wait a week.  During that week, many users will encounter bugs and
work-arounds start appearing in the forums.  After that week, I
upgrade in relative confidence that, while my system may break,
there is a good chance that there will be a known procedure for
fixing it.

     As a mere end-user, I am not recommending any particular
solution.  I am suggesting that more effort be devoted to
(a) recognizing user frustrations, (b) proposing good solutions,
and (c) letting us know that you see the problems and that
solutions are being worked on.

Regards,

John

P.S.
> What I recommend is running the stable tree in general, and then accepting 
> only individual packages in ~arch

Yes, that is what I do.  I would run completely stable but many
system essentials (such as, at my last upgrade, the X11 fonts) are
masked.

P.P.S. Again, my thanks to all developers for their monumental
efforts in making the distribution that I want to use.

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