What ja where "stable" is? [LWN.net]

What ja where "stable" is?

Posted Mar 2, 2006 17:37 UTC (Thu) by ebirdie (subscriber, #512)
Parent article: Testing the bleeding edge

Could stable and development be put up differently than what it have been used to?

Could there be stable layers in a dist to form a "stable" distribution? For example be there layers: sysbase-stable, appbase-stable, app-stable and their *-unstable counterparts. You could form a stable dist by having all the layers from *-stable and putting an unstable layer into the mix makes the dist unstable aka development.

Further the downward layers are formed according to their dependacy-% in upper levels ie. a lib, considered to belong to appbase, needs to have 40% dependacy on it in upper layers. The layer percents could be anything by distribution. Possibly the layers could have versioning.

I think this scheme could draw more development over "stableness" and have bugs fixed onto downward (as in stableness and layers) as well.

Have this kind of scheme discussed or tried somewhere?

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Each package in "stable" and "development" version?

Posted Mar 2, 2006 20:47 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

No.

For a simple reason: Everything at "stable" is one distribution (stable version), everything at "experimental" is another (development version). Giving each indivual package a stable/development knob gives you not two but an almost infinite number of alternatives... What if OOo-stable breaks with glibc-development? And so on.

OTOH, sometimes in a distro there is a limited form of this, in form of "try this one if the vanilla version breaks" packages and development snapshots for tryout.