Preling but not gdm [LWN.net]

Preling but not gdm

Posted Jul 7, 2009 14:49 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Preling but not gdm by khim
Parent article: Why people don't test development distributions

> The real solution is shown by Gentoo: package is added to the system in "masked" state. It's possible to use it - but you need to specifically ask for it.

You echo my thoughts. I'm sure many users would be happy (even eager) to test certain unstable packages that they are interested in. Compare that to the number who would be happy to work with an unstable distribution (I for one would be very reluctant to). The only thing that Gentoo is lacking in this respect is a way to pull in the dependencies of the unstable packages you wish to test without having to remove the stable versions that your other packages are using.

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Preling but not gdm

Posted Jul 7, 2009 19:05 UTC (Tue) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]

Fedora already has this. It is called bodhi. See:

http://bodhi.fedoraproject.org

But the discussion is about development __distributions__ not development __packages__.

Preling but not gdm

Posted Jul 9, 2009 19:40 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

Gentoo, while it is rare for a stable or even unstable update to completely hose a system, a couple of years ago they pushed through an upgrade to expat which bumped the .so version number, which in turn hosed everything depending on expat. On top of this, the usual tool for fixing missing libraries (revdep-rebuild) had some nasty weaknesses that made fixing one's system decidedly non-trivial. I personally had no idea what expat was or how much of a system depended on it (nearly everything that ran in X to start). There are still people running into this as the support thread for the issue in the Gentoo forums shows.