Forever ~x86 (testing)

[ferore]

I'm not trying to start a flamewar (honestly!), but does anyone else feel that Gentoo's stable packages tend to lag behind quite badly?

Here is a list of a few packages and when they went stable on x86:

bitlbee - 0.92 from May 2005
lighttpd - 1.3.16 from August 2005
Icecast - 2.1.0 from December 2004
lftp - 3.0.13 from March 2005
rrdtool - 1.2.6 from June 2005

Most of these packages have more recent versions in portage which have been there for over a month. I know that package.keywords can allow me to run unstable versions of packages I need, however it seems like Gentoo developers are having problems moving packages to stable on a regular basis.

One of the reasons I switched to Gentoo was that it offered up-to-date packages, unlike most of the other distros which rely on release dates for their entire distribution. Is there a problem with packages not going stable soon enough?

[Catch-22]

Firstly, IMO I think your post is misleading. Surely you should be quoting the date that packages were keyworded into portage, not marked stable? The time since the last package was marked stable doesn't indicate whether there are any packages "waiting" to be marked stable.

I'll pick a random package you've mentioned - let's say Icecast
bugzilla shows a bug affecting icecast-2.2.0 marked "major" and "NEW"
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80990
There is a patch near the bottom but nobody has tested it yet. And as you can see the patch was only avaliable at the end of last year.
If you're interested in getting more things marked stable then help to resolve outstanding bugs affecting those patches then create a stable-request bug.

[tsunam]

As a member of the x86 team, this got my attention. There's a few things dealing with marking something stable. Part of it lays with the users...of which posting this kind of topic here isn't going to get it dealt with in a proper manner.

If you feel a package should be marked stable, create a bug on bugzilla AFTER searching for one or for any outstanding bugs with that package version. If none of the above apply then feel free to create a bug requesting that it be marked stable. We'll ask the maintainer/herd if they feel its ready and given that kind of consent will procede to test and mark something. We do however try to maintain a ~month policy for something new (I know in these cases they arn't but this is for people who want a package that's been in the tree for a day to be stable) before we'll consider testing to mark it stable.

Another thing to look at is the dependencies a package has. If say..it uses the lastest mono to build, well it won't be going stable until that mono version goes.
_________________
I'm not afraid of happy endings, just afraid my life wont work that way.

[ferore]

Thanks for the reply tsunam.

Should the developers be looking at their maintained packages more often? A quick check through the available ebuilds for each package once a month or checking a few old ebuilds when committing a new one would help a lot. If a developer has had no bugs for a month on a package then he/she should eventually mark the package as stable, instead of relying on a user to ask for the package to become stable. For me as a user to nag a developer to mark a package as stable just seems a bit annoying.

I'll submit bug reports on packages I'm more familiar with to try and get them stable.

[placeholder]

I understand that reasons might be had, but I always had issues with broken features and compilation issues do to things requiring higher and masked versions of packages and the like in Gentoo when I tried to stick with stable. Remember, there is a such thing as too careful.

[tsunam]