Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Tom Wijsman]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:52:59 +0200
Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:

> On 28/01/2014 14:37, Steven J. Long wrote:
> > I concur that "QA should be focusing on making stable, actually
> > stable, not more bleeding edge." That's not a "performance" issue
> > as you put it, except in management nuspeek. It's the whole bloody
> > point of the distro, in overarching terms: to test and stabilise
> > robust ebuilds. That process is what leads to better software, not
> > staying at the "bleeding-edge" and forgetting about robustness
> > since "a new version is out."
>
> +1
>
> Nice to see a dev echo my sentiments almost word for word exactly.
>
> 9 years later I'm still here, still running Gentoo on all my hosts
> (over 10 at last count excluding VMs). Why? Because Gentoo
> just.works.right.every.single.time, even on ~arch - and that is an
> amazing accomplishment for an distro never mind a USE based one.
>
> If I want bleeding edge I'll use funtoo or exherbo or unmask
> everything -9999. If I want the latest new! improved! shiny! crap
> re-implemented yet again and badly, there's Ubuntu or nightlies from
> rawhide.

Bleeding edge in this context is ~arch, this is a contradiction.

> The joy of Gentoo is that it works on just about anything. Stable
> well-tested code continues to just work for the most part even on
> slacker arches even if the ebuild is years old. When stable is just a
> bit too stable for a specific case, we have overlays and
> /usr/local/portage/cat/pkg.

Do you mean unstable?

> This is why Gentoo works so well, because the weird arches still get
> to play on the same playground with the other kids. I work at a
> carrier ISP and you'd be pleasantly surprised to see just how many
> gentoo-powered vendor POC blackboxes come through the office from
> vendors wanting to sell their network magic. Business seems to have
> cottoned onto the idea that gentoo let's you stop wasting time with
> make and rather fire off emerge, doesn't matter what the silicon is.

+1 but can you please consider to stay on the topic of this thread?

> Slow arches is the price for supporting everything out there. But so
> what? If slow_arch_X is stuck on some old version of an @system
> package, who cares?

The people whom process gets blocked do.

> It's not like portage will pick it for an amd64 box. An old ebuild is
> a file, it sits next to 178,477 files and does no harm, it only gets
> used on hardware that needs it.

It can harm in the long run, as shown in some of the other sub threads;
generalizations like "does no harm" can very well fit as to what you
perceive when you would try it out, but it doesn't exclude harm overall.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
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