On 09/29/2011 01:55 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo! > > Why are there so many packages whose versions never become stable? By > "many", I mean here at least two. :-) > > These are the kernel and Firefox. > > My kernel is currently 2.6.39-gentoo-r3, built on July 18. By examining > ebuilds, I now see that the ~amd64 is already up to 3.0.4-r1. I've > missed 3.0.[0-3], it seems. > > My Firefox is on 3.6.20. Firefox 4 and 5 never became stable, and their > ebuilds have disappeared already. Firefox 6 is still ~amd64.
It's rare that maintainers will support more than one stable version just because of the extra work involved. So, if e.g. version 2.1 of package foo is stable, 2.0 might as well be removed from the tree, especially if it was ~arch. Some versions never get moved from ~arch to stable because if there's a newer version available, it makes sense to concentrate on stabilizing that one instead. Firefox (>= 4) and the kernel (>= 3) are special cases, already explained by Michael Mol.
