On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Stable implies "not so often changing". If you really need newer packages on a > system that has to be rock-solid, then keyword what you need and nothing else.
++ 30 days is too long? How can something new be stable? Stable doesn't mean "I don't think this is broken." Stable means "lots of others have already been using this and so far there aren't many reports of breakage." According to distrowatch RHEL is at 2.6.32. I'm sure it has a bazillion backports, but that is what I'd call stable. Running stable means starting to use the stuff everybody else is about ready to stop using. When an upstream releases a new stable release, that means that it is just now ready for testing, and chances are they'll have another stable release before their previous release really is stable. If you need the release two days after it comes out, you're not really looking for a stable release. At work we typically buy stuff about a year after it comes out, and by the time we're done doing integration and testing it is probably two years old and we've gotten 27 patches in the meantime. That's stable. Gentoo is one of the few distros that really lets you mix and match, so run stable on the stuff you don't care about, and if the purpose of the box is to serve apps on Rails then by all means use ~arch on Ruby. You can do that and not worry about whether it is going to be broken by the latest glibc or coreutils or whatever. Rich
