Sounds like today I have to do another post talking about facts currently in discussion, although I usually try to avoid this kind of posts, focusing more on technicalities, or discussions about Freedom, or in general talking of things being done rather than being discussed.
So, there’s a lot of fuzz about stable markings lately, especially since after x86 arch team was created also x86 stable markings take their time, while before they were done when the developers felt that way.
This of course slowed down the x86 stable tree, but at the same time now we have a stable tree that is almost really “stable”. Unfortunately, although it started more quickly, now the stable marking rate is slowing down, not only for x86 but also for amd64.
The reasons? Too many people not caring for the stable tree and deciding to use ~arch directly, developers who don’t have stable chroots, and so it’s a domino effect: the less the stable tree is used, the less the stable markings can be done.
Myself, I actually started having a stable chroot at the time, but then I had to drop it, for the simple reason that I didn’t have enough time to keep it updated as my whole system.
So, although I don’t pretend to know an answer to this, I have a suggestion: ATs, when you become devs (because most of you will become), don’t drop the stable systems, don’t drop stable chroots, but rather help stable marking stuff. For AMD64 in particular I see a really bad trend :“( the stable markings are almost getting an halt lately… while last year it was the first arch marking stable.
Myself, I’ve decided that if I’m able to upgrade the CPU of this box (to an Athlon 64 x2 4600+, that has the not-so-high price of €245, plus €89 for a 1GB ram stick), or rather if I’m able to get another job to pay for that, as I’m going to upgrade the CPU for sure if I get enough money, I’ll be maintaining an amd64 stable chroot once again, so that at least the software I maintain usually I’ll be able to test and mark stable when everyone else can’t.
Anyway, I hope this is the last post I do following a discussion in gentoo-dev, as it’s also boring for me, as well as for who don’t read gentoo-dev 😛
