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

[Duncan]

Rich Freeman posted on Mon, 31 Jul 2017 11:11:24 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Sorry, to be clear the conclusion I was hoping to draw is that one has
>> 2 repos instead of 1.
>>
>> 1) Rolling.
>> 2) Stable.
>>
>> Rolling is typical ~arch Gentoo. People in rolling can do whatever they
>> want; they can't affect stable at all.
>>
>> Stable is an entirely separate repo, a fork, where CPVs are pulled from
>> Rolling into Stable. If Stable wants to keep a gnarly old version of
>> some package around; great! But the rolling people don't have to care.
>>
>>
> This seems like it would be fairly painful to maintain.  You'd need to
> constantly pull in new packages, and prune out old ones.  It would
> duplicate many of the functions maintainers already do.  I doubt anybody
> would go to the trouble to make this happen.

FWIW, the gentoo/kde team effectively do this right now, tho only with kde 
packages and some of their deps, and it's live/prerelease/release-staging 
vs ~arch/stable, not ~arch vs stable.  But the amount of work is surely 
similar, and they've been doing it now for a number of years and over a 
major kde version bump, an upstream svn/git upgrade and general upstream 
remodularization.

They seem to have the method and routine /down/, and I'm sure many of the 
lessons they've learned could be used were such a main repo split to be 
undertaken, but I honestly have no idea whether they'd consider the 
effort huge or "painful to maintain", only that they do it -- pretty **** 
effectively if I might add from my own consumption of both the main tree 
and kde overlay.

And to address the concern over users with mixed ~arch/stable usage, as a 
user effectively doing it but with mixed ~arch-main/live-kde usage, the 
trouble of having to pull and update from both trees, managing masks, 
etc, isn't actually that bad at all, particularly given the fact that the 
main mask/unmask sets are maintained (automatically via project script) 
in the kde repo so all I have to do is symlink appropriately and add an 
occasionally temporarily overlooked one to my local exception file.


For gentoo/kde it would seem to have been worth it, but you'd have to ask 
them if it's "painful" for them.

So it's certainly doable, maintainable over years and major changes, and 
consumable, as gentoo/kde devs and their users have been and continues to 
demonstrate. =:^)  The /big/ question then is only whether that model's 
actually a good fit for the wider gentoo culture, and I still have my 
doubts on that one.

-- 
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