Gentoo
Gentoo
Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:49 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355)In reply to: What is Fedora? by mjthayer
Parent article: What is Fedora?
"They have the same three basic categories as everyone else - stable, unstable, experimental - and you can choose to run a stable distribution, but cherry-pick packages which interest you from unstable or experimental. You can even IIRC say that you want a specific package version from unstable, but not future versions which haven't yet entered that category, so that once the package moves back into stable your "exception" for the package will automatically go away again."
I must admit I run Gentoo on my desktop at home and have a split setup running a stable core and ~amd64 (unstable) applications where I want to closely follow the bleeding edge. I think what your describing for the series is the concept of unmasking a subset of releases ("give me all 1.6.* releases stable/unstable, but don't upgrade me to 1.7.*"). I must admit it's not something I take much advantage of as if I do have problems I typically just revert the application to the last stable build.
The only package that really causes me management headache is Xorg as it is heavily split up and generally has complex dependency requirements with the rest of the system.