Benjamin wrote a comment on my last post, and I’ll share my answers here because those questions come up every now and then, so it’s better to try to inform everyone. (That and I never write on this blog, so this is a perfect excuse to do so)<\/p>\n
If you assume compile problems, why is that thing unmasked?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Xorg-server 1.7 is not getting stabilized, it’s just getting unleashed onto unstable. Unstable means exactly<\/em> that. Of course we try to do our best and we won’t release something we know<\/em> will break. The idea behind unstable is for users to test the new and shiny stuff before it hits stable.<\/p>\n If you don’t want to help fix bugs, use stable. It’s as simple as that.<\/p>\n I’ve always been irritated by the way the xorg team handled masked\/unstable\/stable releases, as even rc’s were unmasked at times.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Releases in X-land are tough. The numbers almost mean nothing. For instance, the last stable version in the 1.5 series was 1.5.3-r6. And despite the apparently stable version number, it currently has 80 patches to make it run smoothly.<\/p>\n On the opposite side, the current stable server is 1.6.3.901-r2, which is indeed a “pre point release” only has a couple patches. And 1.7.1 doesn’t have any patches.<\/p>\n So don’t let the version number fool you, they mean almost nothing.<\/p>\n As for what we put in portage, well X is a complex piece of software. It used to have more than a million lines of code and it’s been getting some tough love these last 2 or 3 years. And up until recently, drivers were a mess. I had shivers every time a new driver was released : “How many systems will this break?” was a question I asked myself over and over.<\/p>\n There are probably a lot of people who put the xorg-server in package.keywords because they needed\/wanted feature X\/Y or because it fixed some bug for them (it did for me). So now I get a release that possibly breaks build in unstable?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Again, unstable is for power users who are not afraid of filing bug reports if something breaks. We try to make sure that things don’t break every day, but Gentoo being a source distro with billions of possibilities (USE flags, CFLAGS, arches, packages, …),you can’t reasonably expect us to try every possible combination.<\/p>\n So we ask for you help (via bugzilla) in return. Gentoo is a community distro, after all.<\/p>\n So there, that’s it for today, I hope y’all know a bit more about how we manage X and unstable packages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Benjamin wrote a comment on my last post, and I’ll share my answers here because those questions come up every now and then, so it’s better to try to inform everyone. (That and I never write on this blog, so this is a perfect excuse to do so) If you assume compile problems, why is … Continue reading Response to a comment<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/remi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}