On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 2:46 PM n952162 <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Regarding ~amd64 vs. amd64 - these are both just keywords, reflecting > only a qualitative difference, not a special syntax understood by > ebuild/emerge? >
Honestly, I'm not actually sure whether portage has any logic that gives these meaning. If you did a sed on the entire tree and replaced "~amd64" with "apple" and "amd64" with "pear" I suspect that wouldn't break anything, but I'm not sure if there is logic that gives ~arch some special treatment compared to arch. In practice amd64 means that a package is stable on amd64, and ~amd64 means that a package is flagged as being of "testing" quality on amd64. The threshold for the latter is that it builds and doesn't break or have serious problems. The threshold for stability is that it typically has been around for 30 days and is suitable for stable users (I won't go into the details). -- Rich
