Re: [gentoo-user] What's happened to gentoo-sources?

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

On Sunday 21 Aug 2016 10:50:55 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 10:23 AM, Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk> 
wrote:
> > On Sunday 21 Aug 2016 07:28:17 Rich Freeman wrote:
> >> ... there is nothing wrong with having some internal QA on kernel
> >> releases.  4.1 had a nasty memory leak a release or two ago that was
> >> killing my system after only an hour or two uptime.  They took over a
> >> week to stabilize the fix as well (though a patch was out fairly
> >> quickly). So, I'm not in nearly the rush to update kernels as I used
> >> to be> 
> > I've formed the impression that a good many kernel updates are mainly
> > just to incorporate code for new devices, so I don't rush into it
> > normally either. However, this box does have some hardware that's not
> > yet a year old, so I do keep this one up to date.
> 
> The 3rd decimal almost never has code for new devices.  It is intended
> to be 100% bugfixes.  So, you generally don't want to be too far
> behind on that.
> 
> >> (granted, unless you read all the lists it is easy to miss this sort of
> >> thing).
> > 
> > Do you recommend any in particular for this? Gentoo-dev, perhaps?
> 
> Nope.  That memory leak was on lkml I think.  Only reason I spotted it
> was that I searched for it after getting bitten by it.  I doubt I'd
> have even noticed the thread but for looking for it.  I do tend to
> search the btrfs lists before switching between series, because that
> is the thing I figure is most likely to break.
> 
> Honestly, kernel QA could be better in some ways.  When some crippling
> bug comes along they don't always rush to release fixes, and they
> don't have any way to communicate with end-users.  They just assume
> that distros are paying attention to that sort of thing.  And most
> probably are (probably including Gentoo, but I'm not running a Gentoo
> kernel since the Gentoo kernels aren't really going to be optimized
> for btrfs stability).
> 
> >> I ended up bailing on gentoo-sources all the same.  Not that there was
> >> really anything wrong with it, but since I'm running btrfs and they've
> >> had a history of nasty regressions that tend to show up MONTHS later
> >> I've been a lot more picky about my kernel updates.  I'm currently
> >> tracking 4.1.  I might think about moving to 4.4 in a little while.
> > 
> > Well, according to eix, there's only 4.4.19 between 4.1.30 and 4.7.2.
> 
> Those are just the versions packaged for Gentoo.
> kernel.org has 4.4.19 as the only non-EOL version in-between, and it
> is longterm (I think 4.7 is too, but it isn't marked as such yet).
> 
> > Sound policy, I'm sure. How does an ordinary mortal know which versions
> > are here for the long term?
> 
> kernel.org
> 
> The Gentoo team will not let down ordinary users.  If you're using
> semi-experimental features then you're best off keeping a close eye on
> upstream no matter what distro you use.

OK. Thanks for your advice, Rich, as always. Also to Alarig.

-- 
Rgds
Peter