Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo "stable" going in wrong direction ?

[Pieter Van den Abeele]

Hi Rainer,

I forgot (again...) to cc gentoo-dev. I've resend my earlier message to 
the list and I'll cc my reply now too.

On Sunday, Dec 15, 2002, at 15:02 Europe/Brussels, Rainer Groesslinger 
wrote:
>
>>> Currently the package.mask carries packages which have a right to be
>>> called
>>> unstable, e.g. XFree 4.2.99 and so on...
>>> But the stable/unstable situation in some ebuilds is a bit confusing
>>> and
>>> leading in the wrong direction if continued like this ?
>>
>> Can you give an example of these ebuilds?
>>
>> I know there are some apps which are called unstable by their
>> developer, and stable by us. But this happens only after a long period
>> of testing/running the app.

> Let's take an application a lot of people use:
> Mozilla
> We have these ebuilds for Mozilla:
>
> mozilla-1.0-r3.ebuild
> mozilla-1.0.1-r3.ebuild
> mozilla-1.1-r1.ebuild
> mozilla-1.2.1-r1.ebuild
> mozilla-1.2.1-r2.ebuild
>
> 1.2.1-r1, 1.2.1-r2 and 1.1-r1 use ~x86 that means someone who uses
> stable is
> getting 1.0.1-r3
> Does that make sense ? As you said the build process etc. is a reason
> for
> calling something unstable, too, sure :)

There are different reasons for an ebuild to be called unstable:

- security
- upstream dev sells it as unstable
- testing
- building process fails

I this case I would say:

mozilla-1.1-r1.ebuild: Not sure why this is marked unstable (could be 
anything - i suspect either the upstream devs sell it as unstable, or 
it is still in testing (source code was patched only a few days ago))

mozilla-1.2.1-r1.ebuild: Was in testing fase (but apparently some minor 
problems were discovered and a new release was made) - only 8 days old

revision 1.4
date: 2002/12/15 10:44:21;  author: bjb;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -2
During removal of sparc64 keywords from the ebuilds a bad sed 
introduced problematic KEYWORDS line that contained an illegal 
character before the alpha keyword. Fixed.
----------------------------
revision 1.3
date: 2002/12/09 20:17:53;  author: azarah;  state: Exp;  lines: +14 -10
add more moznoxft checks; fix NSS headers not all installing
----------------------------
revision 1.2
date: 2002/12/09 04:33:20;  author: manson;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -2
12-08-02 Keyword change remove sparc64 Rodney Rees manson@g.o
----------------------------
revision 1.1
date: 2002/12/08 21:39:49;  author: azarah;  state: Exp;
some bugfixes




mozilla-1.2.1-r2.ebuild: In testing fase now (only two days old)
----------------------------
revision 1.3
date: 2002/12/15 07:43:55;  author: azarah;  state: Exp;  lines: +3 -3
add missing Xrender include and lib dirs
----------------------------
revision 1.2
date: 2002/12/14 17:34:43;  author: azarah;  state: Exp;  lines: +4 -1
make sure old Xft and Xrender libs are removed
----------------------------
revision 1.1
date: 2002/12/14 17:26:07;  author: azarah;  state: Exp;
update Xft and Xrender.  add _moz to libXft and libXrender to try and 
fix the mozilla not always starting bug


> Perhaps not the perfect example but I doubt someone who is running
> Mozilla
> 1.0.1 is running a more stable Mozilla than someone who is running
> 1.2.1 (of
> course there are other things, too like in stable galeon etc. should
> all be
> compatible to the used Mozilla version and so on[and current versions
> of
> these apps are compatible with newer mozilla versions so that can't be
> the
> reason for 1.0.1 being the latest 'stable').

I think in this case the ebuild author wanted to make sure mozilla-1.2 
build process works before marking the ebuild as stable. (see the 
changelog - there seem to be a lot of issues with it.) I don't know 
anything about Mozilla 1.1 (the authors comment sounded rather negative 
a few months ago - but maybe its time to mark this as stable unless if 
upstream devs sell it as unstable). Mozilla1.0 is apparently the only 
version that works without real problems on all computers right now.

> I believe you are right I just don't get it since I am not a Gentoo
> dev but
> I just wondered...
>
> Rainer
>
> PS: You replied to me and not to the list, so I reply to you only
> again -
> just a hint if it was unwanted

hehe

Pieter


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