On Sunday 11 April 2010 20:36:37 Damian wrote: > Hello, > > I've been using the gentoo stable branch since I began with this distro > (around 4 years ago), but lately I've been unmasking almost all packages > I use in my daily work (emacs, firefox, gnome*, xmonad, etc). > > The reason for doing so is that what is considered as unstable as been > regarded as stable releases for the developers, and the truth is that > the problems I got for using outdated software were more that the ones I > had for using unstable versions. > > Thus, I'm thinking about switching all of my system to the unstable > branch. But first I want to be sure that this is reasonable given the > problems I described before. > > Can you provide me some useful advice according to your experience? > > Thanks in advance, > Damian.
I run ~arch everywhere, and I seldom have trouble. The hiccups that do occur are usually blockers between the latest version of something and the previous version, very easy to fix if you have read the portage man pages. But these days portage knows how to deal with that, so it doesn't expect you to hunt, search, unmerge, merge. It just tells you what it will do and waits for you to tell it to get on with it. Nice :-) Reading this list for many years leads me to conclude: - running ~arch is OK if you can drive portage. Few breakages, on the whole they are easily fixed - running arch. Tends to run a bit behind latest stuff out there, but stable. - mixing the two. No, this is not something you want to do. You are doing it now, so just update make.conf to use ~arch and be done with it. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
