It seems like there has been a lot of discussion here that indicates people are happy with the way it is. There seems to be differences in how packages are updated based on their purpose - desktop packages move very fast, a lot of server infrastructure moves more slowly. It seems like the "best" solution is already in place for the different usecases.
If you hadn't noticed this, you may want to go look. I'm not sure if it's more due to choices made upstream or choices the maintainers make. On Sat, Jul 29, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Christopher Head <ch...@chead.ca> wrote: > I’m a stable user when I can be. I use Gentoo for the configurability, > not for instant access to the newest versions of things. > It seems to be understood in this discussion why some people use ~arch exclusively, but I would like to explain that it is a pattern I have seen very well myself; typically it's possible to solve bugs by keywording in the unstable package and being done with it. When problems related to unstable keywording arise it's usually because a system isn't completely unstable, which despite the name is very stable on Gentoo. It needs to be pointed out that all software in Portage is very new compared to other distributions. Stable and unstable packages work well together because they're closer in time to each other than other distributions respective categories. In fact, stable packages are *so new* compared to other distributions I think a more constructive question to ask is whether or not Gentoo should start retaining older packages for better interoperability with projects whose developers use non-Gentoo distributions.[1] On a distribution like Ubuntu or Debian a developer working for a software firm might wish to use, say, the very latest version of Ruby and Rails. To do this they might pull down the source release and then try to compile it themselves. This used to be the same as opening a portal to dependency hell,[2] but it's gotten better, and we assume the developer gets it installed to their home directory. They spin up a website with the new features and are done with it. The rest of their stack is whatever was in the package manager and might be, comparatively, very old. If they do this for more pieces of software - like if it is done on a developer's workstation, and not a single purpose server - eventually packages will start conflicting and things like containers and single purpose virtual machines start making sense. On Gentoo, the newest software is just there, and it's updated frequently enough that you never have to jump through breaking changes. Most people I have met that use Gentoo use it because they need lots of new software, or need to customize things in ways that are hard to do on other distributions. These people tend to realize that even if they run stable, those stable packages would probably be considered unstable on another distribution. R0b0t1. [1] Personally I don't think that would be a useful thing to do, I just install it in an Ubuntu or Debian VM if I want to play with that project. A lot of issues that exist in this regard are hardcoded paths and other things that come from the design of Ubuntu and Debian. [2] Ubuntu seems to keep their packages more up to date than they used to, because I remember having to compile 2-3 intermediate packages to get something to the newest version a couple of times. Debian still typically has very old software in their package repository.
