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Tom Wijsman posted on Fri, 24 Jan 2014 19:26:41 +0100 as excerpted: |
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> On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 10:46:06 +0000 "Steven J. Long" |
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> <slong@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote: |
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> |
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>> Tom Wijsman wrote: |
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>> > "Steven J. Long" wrote: |
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>> > > What? Without a stable tree, Gentoo is useless afaic. |
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>> > |
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>> > It moves us closer to upstream releases, a little more bleeding edge; |
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>> > a lot of users and developers run that already, it is found to be |
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>> > useful. |
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>> |
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>> What? More vague. As are many of your philosophical statements in later |
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>> and prior mails, so I'll ignore those. |
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> |
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> It is reality; and thus, without a stable tree, Gentoo is still useful |
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> for a lot of users and developers. What is vague about that? |
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[TL;DR readers may simply skip this one entirely. =:^) ] |
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Indeed. While I recognize that in free software people scratch their own |
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itches to a large extent, and thus that for some gentoo devs, they'd not |
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be gentoo devs or contributing at all if there wasn't a stable tree for |
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them to ultimately contribute to, and thus don't begrudge them all the |
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time and effort they spend on stabilizing things, at the same time... |
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|
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Being a ~arch and sometimes live-build/overlay user since I switched to |
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gentoo now a decade ago[1], in part because my previous distro of choice |
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(Mandrake) fell three kde releases (3.x.y, so it'd be 90 days behind with |
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kde's current monthly micro-release schedule, tho IIRC it was a bit |
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slower back then) behind, even for their beta/cooker release... |
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I've often wondered just how much faster gentoo could move, and how much |
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better we could keep up with upstream, if we weren't so focused on 30+day |
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outdated stab?l3 bumping all the time. All that effort... from my |
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viewpoint going to waste on something that gentoo really isn't going to |
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be that great at anyway, certainly in comparison to other distros which |
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REALLY provide a stab?le service, up to a /decade/ outdated, supporting |
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often trailing edge software, in an effort to slow down progress for |
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people that don't want to move so fast. |
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There's simply no way gentoo's going to compete well with either the |
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commercial enterprise distros like RHEL and SLED/SLES, nor are we going |
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to compete well with Debian stable. That's not gentoo's strength, and |
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from a certain viewpoint, any effort sunk into that is simply sunk. How |
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much better could gentoo be for those where the /real/ action is, at |
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upstream release or even live-development versions, if all that effort |
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wasn't being sunk into useless trailing edge stuff that we never have a |
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chance of out-supporting other distros with anyway? |
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Tho as I said, I realize that FLOSS is very much a scratch your own itch |
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thing in many cases, particularly for a community distro such as gentoo, |
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and that for a lot of arch-dev folks, if arch-stable wasn't there for |
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them to work on, those folks simply wouldn't be working on gentoo at all, |
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but on other distros or even out of FLOSS entirely, so it's very much |
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*NOT* a zero-sum game, and I can't begrudge them all the work they put |
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into making gentoo the best it can be for their particular stable-arch |
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itch, either. So I appreciate that they're there and the work that they |
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do, expanding gentoo's practical reach, even if it's not something I'm |
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likely to be using or even particularly interested in any time soon. |
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My point being... yes indeed, there's a LOT of folks for whom gentoo |
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without a stable tree would be a gentoo freed of a to-them useless |
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weight, allowing gentoo to move even faster, and be even better in areas |
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that are already its strength, heavily automated leading edge releases |
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and live-development level packages. And I'm one of those folks! |
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But that doesn't mean that I consider gentoo's stable tree entirely |
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useless, even if in practice it is so for me, because I /do/ recognize |
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it's not a zero-sum game -- killing the stable trees wouldn't get us |
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/that/ much more work on the leading edge stuff, as most of that present |
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contribution would simply go away. At best, I'd guess we'd get /maybe/ |
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20% of it, likely half that. And we'd shrink as a distro and lose a lot |
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of donated services, etc, as well, so what /might/ be a 10% gain in |
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leading edge contribution could well actually end up being an overall |
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loss, too. |
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But certainly, in a thought experiment, gentoo without the stable tree |
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would be at least as useful as it is now, for some of us, were it not for |
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the practical effect I mention above. |
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|
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--- |
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[1] I remember that I tried with 2004.0, but didn't actually get switched |
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until 2004.1, thus... early 2014.... almost exactly a decade ago now, |
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depending on whether you count from when I started trying or when I |
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finally got a functional and complete install. |
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|
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |