Re: [gentoo-dev] avoiding urgent stabilizations

[Fabian Groffen]

On 08-02-2011 12:03:48 +0000, Markos Chandras wrote:
> I see what you are saying. However, the 6 months testing is far from
> what I have in mind. My only intention is to bring a more stable
> experience to our users. Or, stop claiming that our stable tree rocks
> and Gentoo is perfect for servers because it is not. Ye ye ye I know
> that many many of you have Gentoo on servers but do not forget that you
> are developers and you know your way around during breakages. Yes,
> stable tree breaks FAR TOO often. I blame myself for my arch testing of

Hmmm, odd.  I experience amd64 (stable) as being pretty stable on my
servers.  Last breakage which really got me upset was php, but that's
already some time ago.

> Our stable tree is definitely not suitable for server usage unless
> you have plenty of free time to
> deal with stupid upgrades because nobody, for example, cared to write a
> proper elog or news item. You are probably not aware of that, since 99%
> of you run testing tree however if you visit forums and stuff you will
> see many many users complaining about stable tree. If we keep going down

With Gentoo you should update on fairly regular intervals, and have the
time inbetween as short as possible, but 2 or 3 weeks appears to be
fine.  I myself have a cronjob that syncs every night, and mails me the
output of emerge -Dupv world.  When this list gets too large, it's
typically about time to do some updating.

I think it is just regular sysadmin work to evaluate the list of
packages that's going in, and whether you deem that necessary.  I have
masked new major releases of PostgreSQL and MySQL for instance, and of
course Python 3.  I keep the rest updated, and in this way, I can only
say that I experience Gentoo to be definitely suitable for server usage,
with only little time caring about them.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level