[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts?

[Duncan]

Rich Freeman posted on Mon, 24 Jul 2017 19:52:40 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 7:22 PM, Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se> wrote:
>>
>> I hold a perhaps radical view: I would like to simply remove stable.
>>
>> I continue to feel that maintaining two worlds (stable+unstable)
>> carries with it an unneccessary cost.
>>
>>
> The question is whether devs would start being more conservative with
> ~arch if it essentially turned into the new stable?
>
> If ~arch doesn't break then we're probably delaying updates too much.
> If it does start breaking and we don't have any alternative, we'll
> probably start losing users who just can't deal with their systems
> breaking.
>
> Personally I'd rather see stable stick around.  If it isn't updated
> often that isn't a big deal (to me at least).

Indeed, while along with Peter I have little personal use for stable 
(~arch is my stable, live-git my unstable, and stale arch, well, stale), 
I've come to realize over the years that there's enough gentooers, both 
users and devs, that do stable, that killing it isn't going to be the 
boon people only looking at all that "wasted" effort might believe it to 
be.

Instead, were gentoo to lose stable, it'd ultimately shrink as both users 
and devs that previously found gentoo stable the most effective 'scratch' 
to their 'configurable stability itch', were forced to look elsewhere to 
scratch that itch.  While there's a small chance it'd be an incremental 
gain for gentoo ~arch, there's a far larger chance it'd be the beginning 
of the end as without stable, the gentoo community could easily shrink 
into unsustainability -- too few people ever considering being users to 
produce enough incoming developers to maintain gentoo ~arch at anything 
close to the level we have now.


OTOH, there may be a case to be made for the implications of Rich's 
suggestion... and mine above.  Arguably just lose the pretense and simply 
rename stable -> stale, and let people that want/need it continue to deal 
with it on those terms.  At least that way gentoo security advisories, 
etc could then be for "gentoo stale", and as such wouldn't look so dated 
when they come out half a year after the upstream public vulnerability 
and patch and/or unaffected release announcements, because that's what it 
took to stabilize the patched version on some platform or other that was 
holding up the glsa.

Automating stabilization and automated keyword dropping on timeouts seems 
the only other practical choice, as unfortunately, "stale" is what we 
have today in practice, if not in name.

So yes, I support the initiative. =:^)

-- 
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