Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: GLEP 19 -- Gentoo Stable Portage Tree

[Stuart Herbert]

On Monday 02 February 2004 3:17 pm, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> All --
>
> I've posted GLEP 19 which talks about the inclusion of a new 'stable' tree
> in portage that is updated on a periodic basis and only contains security
> and major bugfixes out of cycle.
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0019.html
>
> Please take a moment to review the GLEP and offer any feedback or ask any
> questions.
>
> --kurt

Hi Kurt,

First off, it's great that someone's finally done something about this.  
People have been talking about stable / unstable trees since before I first 
joined the project, with nothing actually done to implement it.

The main suggestion I have is to drop the word 'stable'.  It's an imprecise 
term that means different things to different people.  For example, should an 
ebuild be marked stable because it works, or because the package itself 
works?  It doesn't matter what the official policy is - you'll always have a 
gray area with the word 'stable'.

If you want an 'enterprise'-grade tree, why not call it precisely that? ;-)  
Heh - then we can get a 'carrier'-grade tree too (yes, they really do call it 
that ;-) ;-)

How are you going to manage whether something gets into your enterprise tree 
or not?  I spent part of Saturday night fixing up mod_php ebuilds which 
someone had marked stable on an arch that was missing dependencies.  It's 
just one example of the trouble we have getting people to use repoman.  With 
the current tree - and expectations - these things don't matter that much.  
But for 'enterprise' level quality and higher ...

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                              stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                       http://www.gentoo.org/
Beta packages for download            http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/packages/
Come and meet me in March 2004                 http://www.phparch.com/cruise/

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