Re: [gentoo-user] When a package is marked as stable or not?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 8:02 AM Alarig Le Lay <alarig@swordarmor.fr> wrote:
>
> I’m a little curious about the way a package is considered as stable or
> ~arch.
>

Packages always start out in ~arch and sometimes become stable.  A
package version CAN be made stable if:
1.  It has been in ~arch for 30 days (exceptions made for security fixes)
2.  It has no major problems
3.  It works when built/run against stable dependencies.

Now, not every package that CAN be made stable actually gets marked
stable.  Half of this is the same reason that lots of desirable things
don't happen - people don't get around to it.  The other half are
situations where the maintainer doesn't think that it makes sense to
stabilize a package, usually for reasons you'd probably agree with.

If a package already is stable, then at one point in time it probably
worked fine.  It would only lose the stable keyword if it had a fairly
serious problem and it wasn't likely to get solved.  I couldn't really
speak to the current state of libreoffice-bin, but for most of its
history the binary openoffice packages have been problematic, but of
course popular.  In some sense stable is a relative term - it may be
desirable to offer both a stable and testing version of openoffice-bin
so that users who want to use it don't have to run bleeding-edge, even
if neither is as stable as the from-source version.

Also, a lot of bugs are somewhat situational.  Something that you
consider critical might not be serious to somebody else.  If the
stable version works as well as the versions marked as ~arch then
there is little benefit to dropping the stable keyword, since users
STILL will have to deal with the issue, and now they might have to
deal with other issues as well.

I guess to sum up you could say that the stable version of a package
has received more testing than an unstable version OF THE SAME
PACKAGE.  There are no promises that a stable version of one package
is comparable to a stable version of a different package.

Finally, I'll note that if you ask 10 Gentoo users/devs what they
think stable ought to be, you'll probably get at least half a dozen
answers, so the above is meant more as a description of the status quo
than anything else.

-- 
Rich