Uwe Thiem <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:17:30 +0100:
> On 21 July 2006 04:26, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> Duncan wrote: >> > I don't see it as... annoying; I see it as... challenging! =8^) >> > >> > Seriously, computing is my hobby, and as such, it needs to remain a bit >> > challenging from time to time, or it would cease to be of interest. >> >> Just out of curiosity, are there three "versions" -- stable, testing and >> unstable -- or just two -- stable and unstable? > > Three. > >> And if one uses "~x86", >> is that "testing" or "unstable"? I just think of it as "~x86". > > That's testing. Depends how you look at it. There's officially two levels, stable aka arch(-stable) and ~arch, called variously unstable or testing, which correspond to Debian levels, I tend to use ~arch, as that has a precise Gentoo meaning. By the Gentoo definition, with certain exceptions, only candidates for arch-stable can go in ~arch. ~arch means the package upstream is stable, but the Gentoo packaging, that is, the ebuild script and any necessary Gentoo specific patches may not be stable. If it's not considered a stable release upstream, it's generally not a candidate for ~arch, tho it may be in the tree as -* or unkeyworded, for those who want to play around with it without the usual Gentoo safety net even of ~arch. The biggest exceptions to the above policy are Gentoo core packages such as portage and baselayout where Gentoo /is/ "upstream. Both these packages routinely have -pre and -rc builds in ~arch that are never intended to reach arch-stable. The third level, as already mentioned, is hard-masked. If one chooses to play with their package.unmask and package.keywords such that they can merge these, it's without the usual Gentoo safety net. Sometimes, as with the gcc-4.0 and early 4.1 packages, even unmasking isn't enough, one has to set something like I_WANT_A_BROKEN_SYSTEM=1 to get them to merge. Even there, however, Gentoo makes things easier to manage due to gcc-config (now eselect compiler) and a slotted gcc, so it wasn't too hard to run a default gcc-4.0 compiled system and eselect compiler set <3.4> for packages that weren't yet fixed for gcc4. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
