Re: [gentoo-user] To install a testing version of a package on a stable OS installation.

[R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 3:52 AM, Ста Деюс <sthu.deus@openmailbox.org> wrote:
> Hi, R0b0t1.
>
>
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2017 19:18:50 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> > I run mixed stable and testing packages, and it seems to work very
>> well. The issues I have had had made me consider switching to entirely
>> testing (~amd64) because a lot of issues are actually
>> incompatibilities between stable and testing packages. There are some
>> people in the IRC channel on Freenode who will recommend the same
>> thing.
>
> I consider security that is more on stable part that on testing, and i
> do not need whole system to be testing -- just one package that so
> poorly designed/made that requires for its new version to abandon all
> the data used for its previous version and make all that data anew! --
> So, after that had been done for the new version (on another system), i
> would use that data for the new version in Gentoo (rather than
> recreate that data again for old version and then recreate again when
> new version becomes stable) -- but in Gentoo the program is in testing
> for now.
>

Compared to distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, nearly all
of the packages in portage are "new," even the stable versions. As
such I'm not really sure you can call the testing packages less secure
by virtue of being newer. The distributions listed are the main
targets for security support and Gentoo misses out on most of that. On
Gentoo security support is often provided as a new version of the
software in question, so testing packages might be more secure than
stable ones! In a similar vein depending on what you want to do and
what you need to install, the testing versions have more useful
features or crucial bugfixes.

I don't intend this to be an argument to convince you to globally
keyword ~arch. If you don't see the need for it then that is the end
of it. However, as a software developer I often need a testing version
of a package, and that needs other packages which are in testing, and
eventually there is some widely used package which that needs to be
the version in testing or a set of packages that is mutually exclusive
that becomes selected. It eventually starts to look easier to just
install all testing packages by default. Gentoo is a distribution
mainly for developers. Even if you are not a developer, I suspect you
will start using software that is closer to the bleeding edge by
virtue of using Gentoo. At some point you may start having problems
like people have outlined in this thread, and if you do, do not be
afraid to start using unstable packages.

R0b0t1.