[gentoo-dev] Re: News Item: Future Support of hardened-sources Kernel

[Duncan]

Anthony G. Basile posted on Tue, 20 Oct 2015 05:34:33 -0400 as excerpted:

> On 10/20/15 4:45 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 4:23 AM, Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o>
>> wrote:
>>> However, does this mean the hardened kernel package must stay in ~arch
>>> since it's technically the testing version? Or would we keyword it
>>> based on our own findings of stability?
>> I'd recommend that the team does whatever adds the most value.  If it
>> doesn't want to do QA on released versions then I suggest it all stay
>> as ~arch.  If you're going to do your own QA I don't see why you can't
>> mark versions as stable - just make it clear to users what stable
>> means.
>>
>> BTW, while they're only tracking the most recent stable branch of the
>> kernel, they ARE tracking a stable branch, and not mainline.
>>
> I have been marking hardened-sources based on the grsecurity testing
> patches as stable since forever and will continue with the same
> practice.  "Testing" means they add new features there first and those
> new features can break stuff.  We identify breakage in bug reports and
> hold back to versions that are known to work until upstream fixes the
> broken features.  It works pretty good in practices and most users of
> hardened-sources already know this. What they may not know is that the
> 3.x is no longer public.

And FWIW, ~arch vs stable in gentoo has always been relative not 
necessarily to what upstream considers testing vs stable, but rather, to 
the general stability of the ebuild (and patches, etc) specifically in 
/gentoo/.

Of course there has been quite some maintainer leeway in that, and often 
the maintainer will choose to follow upstream stability guidance when 
choosing versions to stabilize, but that isn't necessarily the case.  
Strictly speaking, it has /always/ been about gentoo-level, not upstream-
level, stability.

So particularly in cases like this where upstream official testing is all 
that upstream makes available, any gentoo stable indicator must /clearly/ 
be based on gentoo-level stability, /maybe/ based partly on the opinions 
of other distros shipping it, but obviously not based on upstream's 
classification, since they don't even make a stable classified version 
available to the general FLOSS community.

-- 
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