>>>In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an >>>enterprise Linux. We commit to a live tree. We don't have true QA, >>>testing or tinderbox. We don't have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles. >>>We don't really have product lifecycles, since we don't generally >>>backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to >>>update to a more recent release. We don't have, and probably will >>>never be able to offer, support contracts. We support as wide a range >>>of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires >>>external drivers; we don't have access to a great deal of the hardware >>>for which we provide drivers. We understand when real life gets in >>>the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers. >> >>QA is a problem. Bugs get fixed, but often they are only fixed in ~x86 >>versions, not in the stable x86 series. For example baselayout: there >>are lot of ~x86 - miles ahead of that is marked x86. Maintainers think, >>it's sufficient to only fix the most recent version. How do they >>legitimate that? > > This one is easy. A stable package's ebuild should not change. Period.
I agree with you there - though sometimes, stable ebuilds are changed - even without changing the version-number. > To "fix" the stable version, means that a new revision of the latest > stable version would need to be made, and that revision would need to be > tested, before it would go to stable. The only real exception to this > is security bugs. Also, in many cases, the bug in question requires > changes that are simply not feasible easily in the current stable > version, but quite easy in the latest version. It really boils down to > this: If you're having an issue with a package in Gentoo and it is > fixed in the latest ~arch version, then you should *use* the ~arch > version (remember, it doesn't mean "unstable" it means "testing") and > you should report back to the maintainers that this is working for you > so that they can get it moved into stable quicker. We don't have the > staff or the time to backport every fix to every stable version. > Remember that in many cases the "latest stable" version varies between > architectures. I chose baselayout for a particular reason. There is baselayout 1.9, 1.11 and 1.12. (i think there was 1.10 too - some time ago - perhaps) I i reported bugs - as usual - but the bug was fixed for 1.11 or 1.12 (i can't remeber, it was about a year ago). The problem: the fix was not backported to 1.9 (which was stable at that time). Since baselayout is a very important part of Gentoo, i didn't think that it would be a good idea, to upgrade my x86-version 1.9 to a ~x86-version 1.11. So i would have expected that such changes would go into a new 1.9-version which could have become stable after some testing - but they didn't. So patches the scripts manually - well, and easy task, although i had to pay attention so they my changes weren't overwritten.
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