If you don't use the ~arch flag it's as stable, if not more so than any other distro's stable version.
This has niggled me for a while...
Are the ~arch flags intended to denote the stability of the ebuilds
or the stability of the packages? To me it makes more sence for them
to denote ebuild stability since software developers already have their own mechanisms for telling us which software they recomend as
stable (even and odd version numbers etc) and I think they should
know best about the software they wrote?
Even better than actual field tests?
e.g. I was quite happy to find that mutts 1.5 branch ebuild has been
marked as stable (Their developer branch last time I looked) which
suggests that infact gentoo doesn't have a policy for marking stable
software, apart from the ebuilds themselves. (Somthing I would really
be happy with since I much appreciate being given a choice about what versions I run.)
I think you'll find that the stability of Gentoo packages is dependant on both the ebuild stability and actual program stability. A new ebuild is let out into the wild as ~x86 until it has no bug reports for x number of days/weeks/months, at which point it's moved to x86, (or other arch).
So both are taken into account. A great example of how Gentoo is so different from other distros.
Is this all clearly specified somewhere, if so can someone give a
pointer to the document, else should it be made more clear to people, since I guess their may be others who arn't sure how they should be inturpreted?
Can't find it right now, but it's there in the policy somewhere, about how long a package goes before being marked stable.
MAL
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