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Here's my take on this issue, and I've had this discussion with some |
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people on IRC as well and for the most part I think people will disagree |
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with me. |
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|
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But they are wrong ;-) |
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|
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I'm actually against mixing testing and stable branches. Here's why. |
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People choose "stable" because they are under the impression that it's |
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somehow "safer" or "less troublesome" than "testing" (or what some |
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people call "unstable"). I'm not so sure I agree but that's not my |
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argument. My argument is when these people go and then try to get the |
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"best of both worlds" by inter-marrying the branches. From my |
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experience these people end up with less stable systems than choosing |
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either "stable" or "testing". The problem is that they are mixing |
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software that were not tested or intended to run with each other. And |
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they come into problems even people in the so-called "unstable" branch |
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don't experience. Recent examples include Xorg and GNOME updates. So |
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these people, and the majority of them are newbies, come to think Gentoo |
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is flaky but it's really their behavior. |
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|
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Unfortunately the Official Handbook tends to encourage this behavior. |
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In theory this should be fine, but in practice it seems to produce |
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less-stable-than-unstable software setups, so I try to discourage people |
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from doing so. Then they laugh at me. |
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|
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But I've been in unstable forever. I never use the stable branch |
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(except for testing ironically) and I remember the days when there was |
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no distinction between stable/testing. Few times I've had problems with |
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an update and the solution is always simple: downgrade the package in |
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question. When I had problems with the cups upgrade, I simply reported |
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a bug and downgraded cups. When I had a problem with findutils, I |
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simply CC'ed myself on the bug and keyworded findutils to stable. To me |
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that's been a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get stable |
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package A and unstable package B to agree on |
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inter-operability/configuration/dependencies/etc. |
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|
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So my advice is: pick and branch and stick with your own kind. It's far |
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fewer headaches in the long run. And "unstable" isn't really unstable, |
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it's "untested". There's a difference. |