Re: [gentoo-dev] avoiding urgent stabilizations

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 7:03 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> I see what you are saying. However, the 6 months testing is far from
> what I have in mind.

I could see there being room for something in-between, but I share the
concerns of others that rolling releases are part of what makes
Gentoo, well, Gentoo.

The problem with snapshots is that there is almost always SOMETHING
wrong with them, and if you don't release until they're near-perfect
then you're pursing 99.999% quality and most devs don't care enough to
work hard towards that.  As a result you end up with very long release
cycles.

I could see room for a system where every week a portage snapshot is
created, and then run through automated testing.  The test results are
then posted, and the release tarball is made available for download.
Then people can update to it if they think it is good enough.  Serious
issues would of course be spotted and immediately fixed in-tree so
that the next weekly release is better, and the typical user
experience would still be to use the live tree so that they get an
experience similar to what they have.

Honestly, I don't even know that this would really work well.  It
might be better to just have a tinderbox that does automated full-tree
testing weekly and just post the results and let devs look at them and
fix things.

However, I don't think any system is likely to work (except on Debian
timelines) if it involves a release-when-its-ready approach unless
ready is something really minimal like "system set compiles and
boots."

Time vs quality vs cost - pick two.  Oh, for Gentoo we've pretty-much
picked cost as being about as close to zero as you can get, so make
that pick one.  Debian stable favors quality, and there are definitely
things I'd use debian for that I'd never use Gentoo for.  That isn't
knocking Gentoo - it is just a reflection of the fact that the distros
have different philosophies.