Re: [gentoo-dev] Moving more arches to dev profiles

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
<chithanh@g.o> wrote:
> Jeroen Roovers schrieb:
>> Mixing stable and testing is precisely what package
>> maintainers (hopefully) do when committing new versions: building and
>> running new software on a known to be stable platform on the premise
>> that the new software is likely to be merged into the stable branch
>> (before the platform changes too much).
>
> At least for x11 maintained packages, we don't support mixing of stable and
> unstable parts of X in the way that you suggest.
>
> We don't mind however whether the rest of the system is stable or not.

Ideally such restrictions should be reflected in the dependencies -
for many packages they are (for example mythtv and mythplugins require
matching versions and this is set in the mythplugins dependencies).

However, in general supporting a mixing stable and unstable doesn't
mean doing so for what amounts to split packages.  Nobody would really
expect kwin 4.10 to work with plasma-runtime 4.11, and so on.

I don't really think there are any real problems here with Gentoo.  I
think almost all maintainers evaluate individual bugs on their merits
and don't use non-standard configs as a "cop-out."  If it breaks with
reasonable but non-standard CFLAGS they should be filtered (again,
within reason).  If there is some missing version dep then it should
be stated.  As jer pointed out sometimes you get reverse dep issues
that aren't straightforward to fix.  In those cases the solution
usually isn't to close as INVALID, but to start a tracker to fix the
issue (since sooner or later it has to be fixed when the dep goes
stable).  Not all bugs can be fixed in 5 minutes, and I think users
generally appreciate that.  Likewise, some configs just aren't
supportable and a brief comment and a close-out is perfectly fine.
Like I said - take bugs on their merits.

Rich