[gentoo-amd64] Re: CD drive opening on boot!!

[Duncan]

Lie Ryan posted on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:45:23 +1100 as excerpted:

> But the only way to be sure that an ~arch plays nicely with the
> currently stable packages is to *not* go full ~arch. With full ~arch,
> you only knows that the package plays well with the latest version of
> all packages; but you don't know how it performs with the stable tree.

True.  When it comes time to stable a package, the devs test the package 
(or set of packages for something like xorg/gnome/kde) on an otherwise 
stable system.  If it works, they can stable it.

But the point is, there's no way to test a half-stable system.  Before 
they stable, they test the new packages (only) on an otherwise stable 
system, and before they ~arch, they test on at least the developer's 
machine that it works, but there's no real testing, and indeed, no 
practical way /to/ test because of the number of possibilities involved, 
on a system that's partly stable and partly unstable.  With Gentoo, it's 
still an option the user has, but as they say, if it breaks, you get to 
keep the pieces, it's definitely a "beware, here be dragons!" option.

Of course, personally, I'm a dyed in the wool and unapologetic ~arch 
user, plus often various development overlays, unmasking various still 
hard-masked packages, etc.  To me, stable is months to sometimes years 
out of date and stale.  But I (sort of) understand folks who want stable, 
tho I honestly don't /quite/ comprehend why they're on Gentoo in that 
case, as it honestly seems to me a much slower cycling distribution like 
Debian stable or the various long term support enterprise distributions 
(Red Hat/CentOS, Novell, UbuntuLTS...) would be more appropriate if long-
term stability is what they're after.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman