[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Jeff Rollin posted
<8a0028260605042228t625ca152p25d65cd6bb9c8e72@××××××××××.com>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 05 May 2006 06:28:53 +0100:

> Or maybe we could move to a fixed release cycle. Debian uses 18 (?)
> months, but maybe a 3- or 6-month release cycle would suit us better

Actually, Gentoo already has that, altho the period is still getting
tweaked occasionally.  That's what the 200X.Y releases are, with the
LiveCDs and stages, and the PackagesCD with its precompiled stuff, for
those who want to go that route.  In 2004, there were four quarterly
releases, 2004.0-2004.3.  In 2005, they reduced that to two semi-yearly
releases, 2005.0 and 2005.1 (with a 2005.1-r1 coming out soon after, with
limited changes fixing limited bugs).  In 2006, the target is again two
releases, the first of which, 2006.0, has already occurred.  Thus, it
looks as if the 6-month cycle seems to be suitable for the time being.

Of course, one of the big benefits to Gentoo is that it's not the jerky
upgrade/wait/upgrade cycle other distributions tend toward, but more a
continuously upgraded system, with the periodic snapshot releases simply
being exactly that, snapshots of the tree that have been fairly well
tested on a particular arch and found to work reasonably well as a place
to start.  Once the system is up and going, the assumption is that folks
will update at least a time or two between snapshot releases, with many
updating twice weekly to daily.  The more frequently you update,
generally, the smoother the updates will be, because it won't be such a
big jump all at once.

Within that system, what's stable at the particular snapshot date gets
tested and included in the stages, and live and packages CDs.  There is of
course some push to get stuff stable by a particular release, but that
pressure hits Gentoo sponsored and targeted projects like portage and
baselayout the hardest, with the vast majority of packages affected more
by the timing and releases upstream than by Gentoo's snapshot releases.

That's part of what makes Gentoo Gentoo.  To change it changes the Gentoo
we know into something else -- /not/ the Gentoo we know.  I doubt you'll
find much support for significant change among Gentoo devs /or/ users,
because after all, if they didn't like it, they'd not have chosen Gentoo
in the first place, as that's one of the defining characteristics that
makes Gentoo what it is.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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