Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Gentoo as hobbyist distro

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 08:09:38PM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Sat, 2019-06-15 at 12:42 +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> Some developers were recently complaining that we're turning Gentoo into
> a hobbyist distro and that's apparently bad.
>
> Do you think Gentoo should allow for experimental and unstable features,
> and possibly breaking changes that make Gentoo more interesting for
> hobbyists?  Or should we block breaking changes and become more
> conservative for users who prefer stable distribution with minimal
> maintenance burden?

This is sort of vague, but I do have a couple of thoughts on the matter.

I have heard of production users deciding to use full ~ keywords, e.g.
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"
This has never been a good idea, production users should be using the
opposite, because ~ packages will have breakages from time to time.

I don't know how it is now, but I know that keeping the stable tree
relevant has been a big issue for us in the past for a number of
reasons, and I still think we should improve that.

Never breaking backward compatibility is not possible. The best we can do
is provide a smooth transition forward for users. Unfortunately,
sometimes, manual intervention must happen. For example, the migration
to the 17.1 profiles had no other option.

At the package level, backward compatibility depends a lot on what
upstreams do. It is up to the individual package maintainers to make
sure that upgrades happen as smoothly as possible -- automatically where
possible, but if this is not possible, upgrading instructions should be
available to the user some way.

Other than that, I'm not sure how to answer this. I would be open to a
discussion to try to figure it out.

Thanks,

William