On 12/24/2009 3:01 AM, Duncan wrote:
But the point is, there's no way to test a half-stable system. Before they stable, they test the new packages (only) on an otherwise stable system, and before they ~arch, they test on at least the developer's machine that it works, but there's no real testing, and indeed, no practical way /to/ test because of the number of possibilities involved, on a system that's partly stable and partly unstable. With Gentoo, it's still an option the user has, but as they say, if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces, it's definitely a "beware, here be dragons!" option.
If by "half-stable" you meant people that installed 100 packages and 50 of them are unstable, I'd agree with you, they're the ones getting the most trouble. They can't be a stabilizer since their system is not "stable" but neither are they a true cutting edge adopter. But I doubt that there are many such people, most people that runs half-stable system would only have at most ~10 unstable packages (or 50 unstable unmasks but 40 of them are for packages that stabilizes last year).
Of course, personally, I'm a dyed in the wool and unapologetic ~arch user, plus often various development overlays, unmasking various still hard-masked packages, etc. To me, stable is months to sometimes years out of date and stale. But I (sort of) understand folks who want stable, tho I honestly don't /quite/ comprehend why they're on Gentoo in that case, as it honestly seems to me a much slower cycling distribution like Debian stable or the various long term support enterprise distributions (Red Hat/CentOS, Novell, UbuntuLTS...) would be more appropriate if long- term stability is what they're after.
IMO Gentoo's edge was not about having the most cutting edge software (pun not intended), but rather "having a choice". With Gentoo, you get to choose which USE-flag to (not) include; you got to choose the kernel options and also to use genkernel; then you've got a choice to run a antiquated, full-stable, half-stable, ~arch, or overlay; you are free to choose how antiquated or cutting edge you want your system to be. And Gentoo's portage makes living the picky eater's life much easier than if you have to compile packages and its dependencies manually to separate the vegetables (or meats if you're a vegetarian; or pork if you're a Muslim; or cows if you're a Hindi; or whatever taboo or personal distrust you have).
For me, I run a mostly stable system and unmasks a few packages that I used most frequently since those are the software that I have the time to test thoroughly since I work with them all the time. I've been running a python 3 overlay (very unstable at that time), but I'm not willing to run a full ~arch since most of those software I don't use often enough anyway.
