On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:36:58 +0100 "b.n." <brullonu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Knecht ha scritto: > > > The one thing I would respectfully suggest is that you carefully > > build your own portage overlay. My experience with Gentoo over the > > last few years is that there is a _anxiousness_ in the portage > > maintainer area to move newer revisions of software into portage > > quickly and then just as quickly to remove from portage what users > > are currently using. @Mark That's certainly true in the sense that we loathe maintaining several revisions of the same software. Each Gentoo maintainer can maintain anywhere from 1 to $BIG_NUM packages, so we strive to have in general at most three versions in portage at any given time. We don't really want bug reports about $old_stable if it's been fixed in a $new_stable. We're not backport-monkeys, like Ubuntu. We do what we do cause we like solving complex problems, interacting with the smart people we call 'users'[1] and our fellow devs, not because "svn diff" is our BFF. :-) > I am usually a bit annoyed by the contrary. On an almost 1-year old > Kubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron) I can find packages that are just barely > x86 stable now on Gentoo. > > A couple of examples I am aware of: > Firefox 3: stable just since one month on Gentoo x86, was included in > KB8.04 Qtiplot: 0.9.x stable and working on KB8.04, all releases ~x86 > (and a hell to compile on a stable system -still didn't manage to do > it) in Gentoo. I don't know about qtiplot but Firefox-3 was blocked by the fact that there were stability problems the first many months, compared to firefox-2. I remember random crashes, etc. Then we had a mysterious bug where it would segfault on first start if compiled with USE="xulrunner", i.e. using the system libxul, but not if we used the bundled one. Then we had some problems with hardened Gentoo, Sparc getting bus errors, etc. If you remember firefox-2 when first it came out, it also had the same kinds of problems. I think it wasn't before 2.0.0.11 that I migrated from 1.5. Gentoo has many arches and the more popular a package is, the more bugreports will come, the harder it will be to mark it stable. Firefox is especially hard to maintain because users use it so very much. > Python releases are often behind, and not mentioning KDE 4, which is > even default on 8.10 Kubuntu and on Gentoo was still hardmasked last > time I checked (but probably Gentoo is just right in this respect, > everyone keeps telling me to wait before digging into KDE 4). Python is a special case. Portage (emerge and friends) use it, so we always try to have as few bugs as possible in the versions that are put into the tree. Kde 4.1 is broken, compared to 3.5.9/10. I tried it and I don't want it. The problem we have now is that 3.5.10 is starting to bitrot, so we'll probably *have* to mark 4.2 stable. > I fully understand that there are good reasons for that, and that the > meta-distribution status of Gentoo makes harder to check packages (and > also that the Ubuntu folks wildly release unstable stuff... firefox 3 > rc in 8.04, for example). I just feel that (stable) Gentoo is > actually a bit *behind* the average Linux distribution in its > revisions of software. You asked for stable, you got it. We're usually faster than Debian stable though. > Most importantly, I also feel that that's something new: when I first > installed my system, more than 4 years ago, I felt it was *ahead*. I did too, but then I was coming from Windows, so that's hardly surprising :-) No, seriously it didn't take long for me to go ~x86. I think it was ati-drivers (oh noez!) and keeping them in sync with xorg-server that drove me to it. > I wonder if it's due just to the sheer increase of work required to > test packages, or if there are decisions behind that (or if it's just > me having false memories). The amount of work has something to do with it, you (users) can help there by filing stable requests if you see a package that you feel has been ~arch for too long. We do react to nudges. Most of us, anyway. /PA [1] It wouldn't really be much fun being a dev for Gentoo if we didn't have the bestest users evers. Srsly :-). If you look at how many bug reports there are and how many are at least partially solved by users before a dev gets to it, it's quite humbling. Sometimes I can spend hours being a commit-monkey for users who've posted bugreports that makes solving the bug a matter of fifteen minutes, tops.
