On Wednesday 03 May 2006 23:02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-user] why firefox is so slow?': > I've asked on multiple occassions for a comparison to a Debian paradigm. > My first distro was Debian. So a comparison to Debian would do me a > world of good.
ARCH ~= STABLE but more volatile -- there's no real release version, packages are maintained separately unless they are packaged together upstream or depend on one another so you'll still get regular updates, but the packages have been though some amount of testing by the devs and those running: ~ARCH ~= TESTING though there's less testing, packages don't have to survive being masked for any period of time so you will occasionally get an package that would only be suited for "Sid". It's still exceedingly rare for these packages to screw your system, but it is possible especially if you don't read the e(info|notice|warn)s that are output during the install or become lax in your config file updating. Anything truly experimental will be masked while the devs (and brave users) test internally. If you do run ~arch and can spend some time reporting you successes and failures, consider becoming an arch tester, assuming your arch needs more. package.mask'd, profile masked, or missing keyword ~= SID (or worse) These packages are either experimental with changes that are likely to break the system, or have been known to break someones system, possibly including data loss. Some development teams *cough*KDE*cough* are quite flexible with the "experimental" label -- I had kde 3.5 installed with few to no problems for (what seemed like) months before they were unmasked. Of course, ebuilds in the forums and bugzilla (and anywhere else other than the standard portage tree) are like foreign repositories. Gentoo devs (and most of the people on the mailing lists) can't and won't provide support for those packages or problems that may/might be caused by them. -- "If there's one thing we've established over the years, it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest clue what's best for them in terms of package stability." -- Gentoo Developer Ciaran McCreesh
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