Re: [gentoo-amd64] Why Is Gentoo So Far Behind?

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Frank Peters<frank.peters@×××××××.net> wrote:
> In a lot of cases, for example perl, Xorg, and gcc, the Gentoo
> distribution lags far behind the latest available releases.
> Even allowing the "~amd64" unstable series, this remains true.
> Why is this so?
>
> I had first considered moving to Gentoo in the fall of 2008,
> but after noticing that the only version of gcc available at
> that time was gcc-3.x, I postponed the change.  In the spring
> of 2009, Gentoo finally moved up to gcc-4.3.x and then I made
> the transition.  But the update to the 4.3 series was a long time
> in coming.
>
> The latest perl, released some time ago, is version 5.10 but
> Gentoo includes only 5.8.8.
>
> The latest Xorg has restructured certain libxcb dependencies,
> which has caused a lot of problems for a lot of packages,
> and Gentoo is behind these changes as well.
>
> (Ironically, it was this libxcb issue as well as the whole Xorg
> modularity mess that first motivated me to seek out Gentoo.)
>
> Now I am not actually voicing a complaint.  Gentoo, IMO, is still
> the best distribution for Linux.  I am just wondering why there
> is such a great lag before a package version is deemed stable -- or
> even unstable.  In my experience with maintaining my own Linux system,
> I never had any great issues with always installing the latest "bleeding"
> edge software.
>
> Frank Peters
>
>

I'd pose this question to the developers/maintainers of Gentoo as
opposed to users. Periodically someone will voice an opinion about
this stuff here. Personally I'm happy with pure stable most of the
time so it doesn't effect me much.

On the other hand Portage is so flexible that you could write a few
ebuilds for packages you're interested in and pretty much be there as
soon as you desire...

Just my views,
Mark