Nick Rout wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:33:09 +1300 Paul William <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
achive a smooth transition from one redhat/mandrake/debian version to another.) With gentoo there is never such an upgrade, just the transition to the next version of each package.
Out of interest, how is stability/QA of gentoo guaranteed? Debian unstable works exactly like Debian, you upgrade from package to
package and as the name suggest you get no grantees of stability.
the package maintainers seem to do a reasonable job of making sure stuff compiles and works before marking it "stable". occasionally there is something that doesn't work, but i've nver had an unusable system. Not just anyone can upgrade an ebuild file and con the gentoo world into updating.
if you are wanting to know the "mechanism" of stable/unstable, it works like this: each ebuild (thats the "formula" that instructs the packaging system how to fetch, compile and install the package) has a keyword, which relates to the architecture. x86 means 'stable on intel x86', you can guess what sparc, ppc etc mean. ~x86 means unstable on x86 etc.
if you set your environment variable ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~x86 then you can compile the latest unstable version of a package. Therefore you can run stable on some packages and unstable on others.
On my system ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -up world tells me that if I upgraded to unstable it would upgrade 250 packages from my world file, and direct dependencies.
There are moves to change to a three tier system like debian (stable/testing/unstable). I haven't read much about that.
My choice, others have legit reasons for their choices.
I suspect that a frequently-updating compile-from-source gentoo user
is>spending more CPU time per application than is healthy ...
Especially with distributed.net, seti, protein folding, and other
worthy>causes clamouring for your CPU cycles ...
-jim
