On 2011-11-28, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Albert W. Hopkins" <mar...@letterboxes.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 18:15 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>
>>> Generally true, but not when something is obviously broken. That
>>> means not even its upstream dev bothered to test it.
>>>
>>> ~arch is for "we think this works, but please give it a go in case
>>> there are problems". It's *not* for "we have no idea if this works
>>> because we didn't even try it once".
>>
>> You're experience is obviously different than mine. I've been using
>> Gentoo for many years and sometimes things in unstable don't even
>> compile... and it's obvious that the Gentoo developers didn't even
>> attempt to compile it.
I don't think that's fair. Perhaps nobody had compiled it using the
exact set of USE flags and the exast set of library versions and
configurations you were using, but I've never seen anything appear in
testing that was so broken it could be said that nobody had ever tried
to build it.
>> This is par for the course.
>>
>> And you're talking about a feature that is already documented as
>> "probably won't work" and you're expecting them to test *that* given
>> that they don't even test things that are expected to work?!
>>
>> Good luck with that.
>
> My experience is different to both of yours. I too have been using
> Gentoo for many years and had good results with unstable. Hardly ever,
> if even at all, have I run into packages that would not compile at
>
> Build failures for me have always been some unusual configs on my end,
> usually strange USE flags. But I don't use any of the more exotic
> packages like those in sci- and games- so YMMV I guess.
I've been running Gentoo for 5-6 years on multiple machines, and there
have been a couple occasions when a testing version of something
didn't build because it wasn't compatible with the testing version of
something else with a particular set of USE flags. Generally I would
just switch back to stable for the packages involved, since whatever
feature/fix that had prompted the switch to testing had long since
made it into the stable version. Other times, just waiting a day or
two and trying again would fix the problem.
--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! It's a hole all the
at way to downtown Burbank!
gmail.com
