Sorry about the broken references (most likely) - darn reply-to-list not 
working...

Marius Mauch wrote:
> - if people really want to be on the bleeding edge side they should use
> ~arch versions, but then they can't complain if things break from time
> to time as you can't have both bleeding edge and super stable at the
> same time. Many complaints that I've seen about Gentoo being "stale"
> were regarding the time it takes for a package to move from ~arch to
> stable.

Agreed - I think this is one of Gentoo's strong points, and it is one
shared with other distros like Debian.  However, the keywords file has
an advantage that you can tailor which packages you want from stable and
which ones from testing.

Gentoo QA has improved greatly from the days when emerge -uD world was
like rolling the dice.  I still exercise care with a few key packages,
but for the most part I don't need to worry about it.

I think that most users want a basically-stable system, with maybe a few
packages cutting-edge - those would be the ones they're interested in.
If I have an interest in thunderbird maybe I want the latest release
candidate installed so that I can mess with it.  However, at the same
time I don't want everything breaking because I have the alpha release
of glibc - unless I'm a glibc hacker.  Gentoo lets me have the best of
both worlds - no fuss with most of the system, but I can tinker with
anything I'd like to.  And there is always accept_keywords for those who
want to live on the wild side.

We just need to better emphasize the pros/cons of all the possible
approaches - so that users can pick the experience they want.  With a
few commands you can be syncing to the user-submitted side of sunrise
with no QA at all and be really cutting-edge.  Or you can be completely
stable (well, maybe not quite to Debian-stable levels - we don't
backport patches as a general rule and stay two years between firefox
releases).

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