On 21/08/2013 03:54, Doug Goldstein wrote: > Its also precisely that mix and match that might cause instability due > to people not testing things. Case in point QEMU 1.6.0 just came out and > it went through a number of release candidates but no one ever saw that > it depends only on Python 2.4 but actually needs Python 2.6. That's kind > of like Gentoo, a package says it depends on libfoo 1.0 or higher and > the dev that tested stable baz 0.8 confirmed it worked with libfoo 1.0, > but baz 0.9 in ~arch still depends on libfoo 1.0 but really needs libfoo > 1.1 and libfoo 1.1 is ~arch as well. So the developer running ~arch > believed that baz 0.9 works fine since he has ~arch libfoo. > > My point is what Gentoo calls "stable" is just something that usually 2 > or more people have compiled and installed vs ~arch which 1 or more > people have compiled and installed. >
+1 I think comparisons with the RHELs of this world to find what stable means are invalid. Gentoo does not play in RHELs space, and anyone who tries to deploy Gentoo where RHEL is a good fit is somewhat of a fool [Aside: I'm a huge Gentoo fan, all my personal machines are Gentoo or FreeBSD and yet I have banned Gentoo outright at work: juniors cause me too much headaches, and Centos fixed all of that] Gentoo simply cannot offer the same guarantees about stable that RHEL can, mostly for reasons of manpower. The best we can do is to state that we are confident stuff works pretty much mostly OK and doesn't break for everyone, so the user can now do their own tests and decide. Let's also keep in mind that Gentoo is a meta-distribution - it lets you build your own distro. So all the heavy QA lifting that RHEL does for you, you now have to do yourself (that role bumps one run down the ladder). The classic meaning of "stable" just doesn't quite fit in that scenario. And, a truly stable mission-critical system is one that has all the required features and emerge is never run again except for bug and security fixes. A rolling release will never be truly "stable" What I'm saying is let's not set the bar for stable too high. Our targeted userbase is somewhat unique in the world. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
