On Dienstag 16 Juni 2009, Frank Peters wrote: > In a lot of cases, for example perl, Xorg, and gcc, the Gentoo > distribution lags far behind the latest available releases.
really? > Even allowing the "~amd64" unstable series, this remains true. > Why is this so? lacking manpower. Really, nothing else. Somebody had to write the ebuilds. Somebody has to test the stuff. You want more actual packages? Great, go to www.gentoo.org and look for the documentation about 'arch testers' and 'becoming a dev'. > > I had first considered moving to Gentoo in the fall of 2008, > but after noticing that the only version of gcc available at > that time was gcc-3.x, so very wrong. > I postponed the change. In the spring > of 2009, Gentoo finally moved up to gcc-4.3.x and then I made > the transition. But the update to the 4.3 series was a long time > in coming. because it takes a long time to check a new gcc against all the ten thousands of packages in the tree. > > The latest perl, released some time ago, is version 5.10 but > Gentoo includes only 5.8.8. and you are missing what? > > The latest Xorg has restructured certain libxcb dependencies, > which has caused a lot of problems for a lot of packages, > and Gentoo is behind these changes as well. really? > > (Ironically, it was this libxcb issue as well as the whole Xorg > modularity mess that first motivated me to seek out Gentoo.) no, it is caused by the fact there is a lot of badly written software out there. Ironically I am using X with xcb for a long time and haven't had problems so far. Even java - once problematic (unless you set a variable) seems to be fixed. > > Now I am not actually voicing a complaint. Gentoo, IMO, is still > the best distribution for Linux. I am just wondering why there > is such a great lag before a package version is deemed stable -- or > even unstable. In my experience with maintaining my own Linux system, > I never had any great issues with always installing the latest "bleeding" > edge software. fine. But gentoo is a bit bigger than your system. I answered it above. The problem is manpower. There are way too many packages for way too few devs. Testing the crap takes its time - but sadly there is a lack of arch testers too (one requirement - a pure stable system, is one reason holding me back). But despair not. You want latest X? Install the X11 overlay. It is there to test the very latest stuff. You want latest gcc? gcc-porting is for you (gcc 4.4 is just sweet...). Perl? perl-experimental. Today a lot of stuff is tested in overlays first, before becoming part of the portage tree. This could be faster - but again, manpower is the magic word. (also one reason why I dislike overlays: it makes portage tree looking stale and gentoo looking dead, while the overlays are very alive).
