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Is there any point in running stable Gentoo anymore?
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davidm
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 1:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

genstorm wrote:


The guide has existed all the time with ~arch users in mind, since for a long time Plasma-5 only was for ~arch users. I agree that making it fit for both can lead to issues, but it still needs to be as universal as possible since both groups of users rely on it.


In fact I remember when in order to run Plasma 5 you had to install the kde-overlay and unmask a bunch of packages. It wasn't even in ~arch.
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davidm
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

desultory wrote:


ulenrich wrote:
Newbies should be encouraged to try a pure Gentoo unstable!
Perhaps, if they require some feature, package, system, or whatnot only available in ~arch, otherwise installing and maintaining a stable system is a better introduction to Gentoo. After using stable for a while, let the user decide whether to experiment with ~arch, or mixing, as suits their needs and skills. Attempting to force your paradigm on someone just because it suits you is generally not particularly helpful to others.


I remember being a newbie on stable. The thing which got me was of course that many of the applications were very old and lacking features I needed. That led to learning how to mix and install the ~arch versions. Eventually the mixing becomes too much and you just move over to ~arch.

Perhaps it might more make sense to suggest to newbies a choice:

Do you tend to always want the newest application or system versions or would you prefer to have a bit more stability at the expense of using versions which might be a year or two older than the newest version available?

For users who always tend to want the latest versions ~arch definitely makes the most sense I think even if they are completely new to Gentoo. In particular this probably also makes the most sense for former Arch Linux (the distro) users as it approximately mirrors the Arch Linux experience as their normal repo is pretty much like our ~arch. (Technically they have testing versions too but they tend to be in testing for very short periods of time - as a general rule once upstream marks it stable, it is in the main arch repo). ~arch is probably better for any user coming from a rolling release distro as well.

For Ubuntu or Debian users arch (Gentoo stable) probably makes the most sense as that is what they are used to.

As The Doctor suggests Gentoo stable is almost certainly the best choice for servers. With the exception maybe being for someone who needs a cutting edge ffmpeg or php support for their server. I know I used to get very frustrated with old versions on CentOS and Debian and had to play the special repo game just to get some of my server scripts to run and function correctly. They all assumed far newer versions than what these distros typically offered in their regular repos.
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jonathan183
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 2:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I prefer to run Gentoo stable and keyword the few packages I need to. Having said that I use IceWM and don't have a DE installed anymore so ... used KDE 3 series but never got on with KDE4, used Gnome 2 but never got on with Gnome 3.

Running stable with no packages keyworded is not practical for me, there have always been things like Freemind which have at least in the past required keywording of dependencies.

At first I missed kmail ... but now I use claws-mail. I liked k3b but now either use graveman or cli for cd and dvd burning. Libreoffice is not lashed to a DE :)
... I still think it's good to have the choice 8)
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keet
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I still run stable Gentoo, though I do have an /etc/package.keywords directory with nine files and a few dozen packages in it. I try to keyword using <package-version instead of keywording all future versions of packages. I'm not really sure that I feel like a second-class user/citizen as a user of 'stable' Gentoo, though I do at times feel disappointed that things that are considered stable for other distributions seem to take a long time to be marked as stable on Gentoo. Usually though, they are things that I just want to try out of curiosity, such as KDE and Gnome, and not things that I really care about.

One area where Gentoo could use a bit of (marking as suitable for) stabilization, though is in the arm tree. Most of things that I want to use on my Raspberry Pi are in overlays and not even keyworded for arm, even though they work, and I have so many custom ebuilds for it that I wish that I had kept better track of it from the beginning, because I'm not even sure what I have that I modified from the main tree, or from an overlay, or from somewhere else.
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

keet,

arm and arm8a are under heavy development. There is no point in using stable as its too far behind.
You need ~arch and things that are not keyworded yet.

Do file keyword bugs though.
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asturm
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

davidm wrote:
For Ubuntu or Debian users arch (Gentoo stable) probably makes the most sense as that is what they are used to.

Let me extend the recommendation to older machines that are happy with (much) less package turnover. Even though having unmasked latest Plasma and Applications, in addition to using an older GCC than necessary (4.8.5 as mentioned) I am running a mostly stable Gentoo on my old laptop. That also catches the rare incompatibility with old GCC and other minimum dependencies by e.g. Plasma/Applications.
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steveL
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PostPosted: Fri May 06, 2016 1:15 pm    Post subject: Re: Is there any point in running stable Gentoo anymore? Reply with quote

leifbk wrote:
I have been running stable Gentoo on my desktop since 2003, first on x86 and since 2010 on amd64, and have mostly been satisfied with it.

Me too (though a bit later.)
Quote:
However, with the current Plasma 5 upgrade, I've felt like trapped in a limbo, halfway between packages marked as stable, and a package.keywords file that was becoming seriously ugly...
Plasma behaves a lot better now than it did with the "stable"; the annoying plasmashell segfaults whenever I hovered above the taskbar has totally disappeared.

That's good, but if you've been using KDE that long, then you must know that every new major version of it is a nightmare upgrade; as a long-term Gentoo user, you plan upgrades, and are aware that you are building from source.
So it is natural that a major KDE upgrade is going to be trickier; and ofc the people working on it are not using stable.

None of this seems a reason to give up stability on base components like bash, or the myriad libraries you've never heard of.
(Good luck dealing with that sort of snafu for a machine on the other side of the world.)
Quote:
Somehow, running stable Gentoo has started to make increasingly less sense. As of running unstable, some bloopers with premature updates should probably be expected. But watching this excellent forum has always helped me out before, and I don't think any package upgrade can seriously bork my system beyond salvaging.

No, ofc it can't: you can always reinstall, same as ever.

It can and will, however, lead to you requiring that reinstall; and in the interim any time you get a problem with packages, some "developer" or another will tell you it's your own fault for "running unstable" (or "what did you expect?") and on another day the same bod will tell you it's better to run unstable (for supah-sauce^W^W to be the same as everyone else.)

Personally I much prefer a mostly-stable system, and unmasking things I don't mind breaking, than the inverse.

As an aside, this is in fact the required setup for arch-testing.

OFC if you want to run something like KDE5 before it's ready [1], then it may well be better to track current development, since it's still in flux, so ebuild developers aren't really thinking about real stable yet: just to get more testing of in-development software.

More testing of in-development software is the reason people are encouraged to chase the latest "shiny".
It is not about delighting the users, whatever the pretext; rather, it is about getting them to do the QA work, "for free".

Usual disclaimer: I really do not care what someone else runs on their machine. It is, after all, their machine.
=
[1] I mean ready as far as downstream end-users are concerned: not what fanbois call "ready", or more accurately "better" by comparison to last month's bug-fest ("aren't I brave for 'handling' a broken desktop this last year or two?")
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