I think the idea of a meta distro on top of a stable base is the way to go, let people choose just what they want on bleeding edge. I like my kernel, gcc, and perl solid, sometimes I want firefox's beta's but that doesn't mean I want the rest of the system like that. At some point gentoo's ~arch became more stable that stable, this needs to end. Even if it means making stable a bit more unstable. I'd like to see more people running stable systems.
~arch is going to be aimed more at things that are stable enough, and pending stable. It's going to become more unstable than it is in a sense because I'm not afraid to hardmask stuff that was ~arch and is found to be broken. I'm also not afraid to release slightly broken stuff into ~arch, for example I'll release a new git into ~arch without an update noperl patch which means using -perl won't work. I won't release completely broken or overtly buggy things into ~arch though, I'm just not afraid to release with a missing patch (set) as long as it'll build and work in most cases and update later.
I've decided on a policy for stabilizing the kernel, first of regen2's kernel is vanilla-sources, if you're running another sources this doesn't apply. I will stabilize the previous kernel when the new major version is released so I will stabilize 2.6.28.x when 2.6.29 comes out, after that I will stabilize each new kernel a few days after it hits the tree (actually I may not wait), since the kernel's development model makes it highly unlikely that regressions will be introduced that late in the cycle. I may use a similar update scheme for other packages but it will be a package by package basis. But likely once a major version moves to stable it will be trivial to move new minor versions to stable.
I want to know what people use? what should be stable in regen2. 2 things I won't stabilize right now are qt-4.5 and kde-4.2. They work well enough but have too many bugs upstream, imho (should a kde developer look at this feel free to look at my buglist on your bug tracker, prtscrn must work before I'll mark kde stable, but hey at least dpms works with screensaver now). Anything else goes what do you use/need that's in ~arch and has been there for a long time. feel free to mention in comments, the dev list or the Bug tracker
I agree that a "stable" system should not only be feasible, but it should be the recommended state. It should probably be easier for a user to use stable than ~arch.
ReplyDeleteCurrently ~arch is stable enough that it is easier to use ~arch than stable on a desktop. In my opinion, this is mostly due to the fact that Regen2 uses baselayout-2 and openrc, which are labeled as ~arch upstream. This causes problems with "stable" packages in Regen2 not liking the version of some of the dependencies.
For example, the latest stable version of openrc requires >sys-fs/udev-133, but the latest stable version of hal pulls in the latest stable version of cryptsetup (if the crypt useflag is set, which it is by default in the current desktop profile), which requires !>sys-fs/udev-125.
So, to have a "stable" Regen2 desktop requires using ~arch versions of at least a few packages (e.g. hal and cryptsetup), or not using the default flags setup by the desktop profile. IMO, "stable" should mean that "emerge -e @world" should build without any errors, assuming the user has not done any unmasking or modified the default USE flags, etc. (Of course, if the user has changed USE flags and/or asked for masked packages then rebuilding world should not be guaranteed.)
Sadly, I think it's going to be very hard to have true "stable" systems in Regen2 until Gentoo moves to baselayout-2 and openrc.
BTW ... I hate the current state of Gentoo's stable. In some major cases it is older than Debian lenny. For example, stable gcc in Gentoo is 4.1.2, but stable gcc in Debian lenny is 4.3.2-2. How on earth does a source based distribution justify having an older stable compiler than a binary distribution? Especially when that binary distribution is Debian, who has extremely conservative rules for letting packages into stable. If it's good enough for Debian stable, it should be good enough for just about anyone. Un-freaking-believable.
openrc udev, should be fixed now that openrc is marked stable (that was a drobbins-ism). I had forgotten about the crypt problem. I'll look into it and make sure it's fixed. crypt is not enabled by default on the the default profile... I did know about that problem at one time, I'd forgotten about it. I'll see what I can do.
ReplyDeletethe stable compiler issue is actually more needed by source distro's, gentoo's always been a bit behind, they do so by locking toolchain (the binary distro's), and having less 'supported' packages. I intend to do the same on the former for similar reasons.
ReplyDelete