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Am Sonntag, 16. Juni 2019, 20:09:38 CEST schrieb Michał Górny: |
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> |
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> Some developers were recently complaining that we're turning Gentoo into |
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> a hobbyist distro and that's apparently bad. |
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> |
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> Do you think Gentoo should allow for experimental and unstable features, |
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> and possibly breaking changes that make Gentoo more interesting for |
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> hobbyists? Or should we block breaking changes and become more |
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> conservative for users who prefer stable distribution with minimal |
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> maintenance burden? |
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We're torn between extremes here, and I think nothing we do will make |
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*everyone* happy. That said, we do have the duality stable/~arch, and that |
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should already answer a large part of that question. In an ideal world, stable |
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should be rock-solid and production worthy, and ~arch should be bleeding edge |
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with occasional bugs and compile failures that come with that. |
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Where that doesnt work (say, profiles) ... |
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Let's start with the following assumption: Our main objective should be that |
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Gentoo has a vivid, productive, and growing developer community. (If you think |
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that doesnt sound right, you can try replacing "developer" with "productive |
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contributor".) |
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Developers exist in two overlapping types, broadly speaking: |
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1) hobbyists who do something because it's interesting and cool |
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2) employees who are paid to do something because it's useful |
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So, we need to find a compromise between these two, with weight on the group |
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that contributes to Gentoo most. |
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Right now my personal feeling is that we're trying to set long deprecation |
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times when something is going away, and that nevertheless migration to, say, a |
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new profile tends to only *start* when we threaten that the deprecation time |
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will be over soon and the old one will go away. |
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We can't be stuck at the same level forever. Occasionally we will have to |
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change something that requires manual intervention. Hey, if you have a big |
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server farm, that's what all these horrible automation tools (puppet, rex, |
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...) are good for. I think. Let's do it carefully, announce it, announce |
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deprecation times, and give people time to do it. And then move on. |
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-- |
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Andreas K. Hüttel |
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dilfridge@g.o |
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Gentoo Linux developer |
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(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice) |
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