Preling but not gdm [LWN.net]

Preling but not gdm

Posted Jul 12, 2009 7:56 UTC (Sun) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178)
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. Once enough "success stories" are obtained the mask is
> removed and all "unstable" users are upgraded.

We do? ;) There are only a couple situations I can think of where a new package/version would be added to the tree in a masked state:

- you know it's going to break things and you need guin- er, testers to smoke out the worst of the bugs (eg. gcc-4.4)
- you have a large number of packages with interdependencies between each other that need to all be made available at the same time (eg. gnome)

...unless by masking you're actually referring to keywording (~arch / arch). Then yes, packages need to be in ~arch (unstable) a minimum of one month before they can be stabilized. We don't need success stories, just a lack of bug reports. Stabilization is done by dedicated arch-tester teams, so you will always have at least one other set of eyes on a package before it hits stable.

IMO Gentoo generally manages to keep the unstable tree in working order and usable enough for everyday work. I think this can be attributed in part to the fact that we don't do releases and therefore don't have that period of churn that conventional distros do where everything is getting updated at once. Basically, we don't have a development cycle; we're always in development.

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