Lie Ryan posted on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:08:48 +1100 as excerpted: > 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).
You're right about the choice, of course, but... well, the whole kde3 thing has nicely illustrated the issues stable gentooers have. To this day I'd not call kde4 ready for stable yet, and CERTAINLY not as stable and usable as kde-3.5.10. 4.4 should be getting close, I expect it'll be like a release candidate traditionally is, it could be stable if it had to be, but there's a few more bugs they want to kill before it's fully released. 4.3 is late beta, 4.2 was early beta, a LOT of SERIOUS bugs still hanging around, 4.1 was post-freeze alpha, and 4.0... was very early technology demo, mostly prototype, from a user perspective. OTOH, with the new name and focus on devs, KDE SC /is/ really aimed at devs, NOT end users, with the included apps really being developer demos, and the kde4 versioning and kde 4.2 stability claims /does/ more accurately reflect that -- it's just too bad they did the versioning so long before they announced their target audience change, as a lot of users were deceived into thinking it was ready for them... But be the upstream issues what they may, the problem for most distribution users including Gentoo users (and devs, BTW) is that support for the stable and production-ready version, kde3, ran out WAAYYYY before the next version, kde4, was similarly stable and production ready. "Oh, but there's the kde-sunset overlay." Yes, but it's officially user-only supported, that is gentoo-dev unsupported, because kde3 is unsupported upstream, as is the qt3 it's built upon, and there's no gentoo-devs interested in taking on the responsibility of continued support under those circumstances. That's not the sort of support stable users tend to be looking for. Meanwhile, the LTS/enterprise releases still have another year or more of kde3 coverage, as that's what was stable and shipping when their LTS product shipped (bar Ubuntu, of course, since they didn't ship an LTS kubuntu precisely because they foresaw exactly this sort of issues coming up, despite all the claims of continued support from kde at the time, claims that turned out to be worthless, for the ordinary distribution user -- but in hind sight kde was even then already refocusing their targetting, and weren't talking about the ordinary user any more). But back on the topic of Gentoo. Gentoo is and always has been a rolling upgrade community distribution, that reasonably closely follows upstream. When upstream drops support, Gentoo, without the resources of the enterprise/corporate distributions, has little choice but to ultimately drop support as well. Sure, the packages stay in-tree for awhile sometimes, but they don't actually build with modern gcc against modern system libs, and eventually, treecleaners or someone notices, and they get pulled. That's not the sort of thing stable users enjoy, for sure. Really, neither do they tend to enjoy the constant updates Gentoo has, changing their work environment out from under them. Good Gentooers soon learn that if they're updating less than once a month, the updates DO pile up, and the process DOES get rough. By three months, an upgrade gets difficult and stressfull, by six months, it's getting easier to start from a brand new stage-3, by a year, which is what Gentoo /does/ /try/ to support, a brand new stage-3 is generally going to be much easier than the exotic bugs you'll get trying to update in place. Yet stable users normally /want/ their stuff stable for a year or more, and expect no serious problems on update within their release slot, even a year or more out. The all-at-one-time release upgrade, OTOH, is assumed to be the normal case. Meanwhile, gentoo support for stale packages disappears rather soon, relatively, and users are forced into either not updating any more (no security updates) or upgrading. The enterprise/LTS distribution releases at least have a support timeclock that people can schedule their computing life around. As I mentioned above, it took the kde3/4 fiasco to really open my eyes to this, but open them it most certainly did! Generally speaking, enterprise and debian stable are the only ones supporting kde3 still, even tho kde4 isn't yet ready to fill its shoes for production machines. > 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. Of course, that's where Gentoo excels. It gives you the choice and ability to do just that, even if it's not that well supported. But in fact, because it's so easy and so necessary for stable users at times, there's /enough/ people doing it, that it generally works out /reasonably/ well. But still, tho the problems will be a bit different, I don't think running all ~arch is much different in overall problems than partial, or indeed, all stable, because if nothing else, hardware updates tend to bite all-stable people harder than all ~arch people, and also because stable /is/ a bit stale at times, and it's simply hard to remember what the fix was for that problem that happened over a year ago. I know I've certainly experienced that myself, running the kernel rcs, when the release is what goes ~arch, and stable is generally a release behind that. So when folks ask about kernel problems on the brand new stable kernel they're just upgrading to now, it's typically six months or more since I encountered the same issue, and I've often long since forgotten the details, as I'm on to newer and different problems. The full release would seem to be about right, I'd think, for most users not wishing to push the edge, as it's at least new enough the edge pushers still remember the issues and how to fix them, while being old enough the big issues all generally have fairly well known solutions. If I'm not mistaken (I run direct linus kernels and don't touch gentoo's kernel distribution at all, tho I know when they go stable since I follow the dev list and see the announcements/warnings there), current release is what gets ~arched for at least ~x86 and ~amd64 on Gentoo, so that's what I'd think would be about the best place to be, on a package I happen to follow reasonably closely, upstream. Similarly for a couple others I follow reasonably closely upstream. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
