Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Weekly News Letter - "Where is Gentoo Linux 1.4"

[Seemant Kulleen]

> Firstly, this is not a flame. Please give me the benefit of the doubt in
> that respect :)

Neither is this.
 
> There is no gentoo stable in the same way that Obsd has stable. Obsd stable
> can pretty much be guaranteed to work and play happily. Ebuilds are marked
> stable or unstable based on whether the _ebuild_ is known to be reliable,
> not the package which the ebuild installs.

An ebuild is a bash script -- it doesn't take much for an ebuild to be stable.  In this case, rob, your reasoning is completely flawed.  The set of ebuilds marked stable for a specific architecture contains programmes and libraries and utilities, etc etc that are known to work reasonably well (given the large variation in customisation and optimisation settings). 

According to policy, an ebuild is marked stable for a platfrom if and only if recent history (~1 month) shows no new bugs open for it, and all previously opened bugs having been resolved.  That gives us a good indication (assuming, of course, that users use our bug tracker -- and surely gentoo-stats and gentoo-stable websites will start to grow an increasing role in this respect) that the package works reasonably well for the majority of users.


> There is no indication inside of portage as to whether a program is stable
> or not, other than extreme cases where ebuilds are masked because the app
> is very broken. Its not possible for us to say "this is a stable platform"
> for a gentoo "system" can include any number of programs that we may or may
> not have written ebuilds for which can affect the system.

Rob, you, your mentor and I need to have a chat.  If _we_ did not write it, then _we_ should have checked it, and _carefully_.  And if it did not pass basic tests of functionality, syntax, etc, then _we_ should not have put the damned thing into portage in the first place.


>
> Obsd peeps know exactly what apps are installed in their base system, so
> they can mark the stuff stable when they're fairly sure the base system
> doesn't blow up.

Gentoo peeps know exactly what apps are installed in their base system, so we can mark stuff stable when we're fairly sure the base system doesn't blow up.

> Also, I think you misunderstand "releases". 1.4 is a release of an install
> CD and maybe GRP. Thats it. It makes no difference to the actual system
> once you start running emerge sync you'll be back in the same place as
> someone who installed with a 1.3 install CD and has been running emerge
> sync.


You got this one right.


-- 
Seemant Kulleen
Developer and Project Co-ordinator,
Gentoo Linux					http://www.gentoo.org/~seemant

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