Roy Marples wrote:

I maintain and play a game called Eternal Lands. I'm a Council member,
but not part of the games team/herd.

One of the problems games have with stable/unstable/testing/whatever
keywords is that upstream changes things that in any other application
just would not change. For example, the network protocol when talking
to servers. EL is very version specific and when a new client is
launched, around once every 6 months they change over right away. That
means our users need the game right away.

Thanks for the example, trust me if I tell you that we can understand the situation pretty well.

I used to commit EL straight to stable for this very reason, but now
after a few Gentoo QA people bitched EL will never ever have a stable

I'm nearly sure that you always (at least) compile and run the new version in your box before you sent it to stable, didn't you? So, at least, you are able to say that it works in your case.

So instead I periodically have to let our users know how to
unmask EL just so they can play their game.

There are always ways to educate users about how to use portage properly.

So no, in many cases NOT committing straight to stable CAN be
detrimental to our users if all they want is a games machine. You could
argue that they shouldn't be using Gentoo, but I would argue why should
we discriminate?

Ehm, IMHO call it discriminate is a big hard. Are the gnome-2.18 or beryl users discriminated or they should be using something different to Gentoo? They only thing people have to do is use some ~arch branch packages, which isn't too difficult (in Gentoo).

This is how I see it:

Problem with keywording straight to stable is that arch teams are very zealous about our stable branch. We put a lot of time trying things to not fail in stable, and if an app is broken, we prefer to not force the users to compile and install another broken (or unknown to be broken) version and work to fix the current stable (patches or bumping) together with the maintainer.

But if you send things, that you can't try, to stable, the qa baby jesus will cry if it fails, because nobody has taken care of even compile it in the arch :)

Games are not part of core system, so IMHO, use the ~arch branch to have the latest cool version to enjoy, could be a good way to go for those el1te gam3rs.


Jose Luis Rivero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Gentoo/Doc Gentoo/Alpha
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