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