On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 8:02 AM Alarig Le Lay <ala...@swordarmor.fr> wrote: > > I’m a little curious about the way a package is considered as stable or > ~arch. >
Packages always start out in ~arch and sometimes become stable. A package version CAN be made stable if: 1. It has been in ~arch for 30 days (exceptions made for security fixes) 2. It has no major problems 3. It works when built/run against stable dependencies. Now, not every package that CAN be made stable actually gets marked stable. Half of this is the same reason that lots of desirable things don't happen - people don't get around to it. The other half are situations where the maintainer doesn't think that it makes sense to stabilize a package, usually for reasons you'd probably agree with. If a package already is stable, then at one point in time it probably worked fine. It would only lose the stable keyword if it had a fairly serious problem and it wasn't likely to get solved. I couldn't really speak to the current state of libreoffice-bin, but for most of its history the binary openoffice packages have been problematic, but of course popular. In some sense stable is a relative term - it may be desirable to offer both a stable and testing version of openoffice-bin so that users who want to use it don't have to run bleeding-edge, even if neither is as stable as the from-source version. Also, a lot of bugs are somewhat situational. Something that you consider critical might not be serious to somebody else. If the stable version works as well as the versions marked as ~arch then there is little benefit to dropping the stable keyword, since users STILL will have to deal with the issue, and now they might have to deal with other issues as well. I guess to sum up you could say that the stable version of a package has received more testing than an unstable version OF THE SAME PACKAGE. There are no promises that a stable version of one package is comparable to a stable version of a different package. Finally, I'll note that if you ask 10 Gentoo users/devs what they think stable ought to be, you'll probably get at least half a dozen answers, so the above is meant more as a description of the status quo than anything else. -- Rich
