Gentoo 10.1 LiveDVD Brings Fixes & Enhancements

[iapitus]

Hm? Why can't a normal user use KDE4? Care to explain?

As of the last I checked (Friday maybe?) it was still in their "testing" branch (keyworded in gentoo vernacular) - http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/deskto...ml#kde_portage - so if a normal user were to, for example, emerge -av kde-meta they would get 3.5.10. Users are welcome to install anything that has an ebuild for it, of course, if they're willing to move to an "unstable" system - but the media the Gentoo guys have been pushing for these LiveDVDs speaks of them as if they were a "release" of some sort - when in reality in any other system they would be Alphas or Betas at best.

Don't get me wrong - I really liked the LiveDVD (10.0 was really nice aside from the kernel modules not working for me - still downloading 10.1) - but it honestly really frustrated me to see so many packages either keyworded or unmasked in something they called a "release".

[RealNC]

It's in stable.

Also, even if it wasn't, "normal" users can put ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~ARCH in their make.conf in the first place, just as "normal" users can install Ubuntu instead of Debian.

PS:
Calling Gentoo users "normal" somehow sounds wrong, don't you agree

[V!NCENT]

Calling Gentoo users "normal" somehow sounds wrong, don't you agree

Ubuntu is for human beings so all Gentoo users are alien wierdo's

(I hope I don't have to mention that I am joing )

[Smorg]

It is expected that a "normal" Gentoo user will know how to use keywords and masks. It is a very basic concept thats pretty much required in order to maintain a system. Aside from the fact that kde 4.3.1 is now keyworded and unmasked (at least on amd64), the intention is that the stable branch is really only for things which have been very well tested on Gentoo, something which is important on mission-critical server systems. For desktop users this can be confusing because half of the time a new package version will be strictly bugfix, yet will be in the unstable branch of Gentoo even though the upstream developers consider the software stable - moreso than an older version considered stable by Gentoo but without those bugfixes. The other half of the time they might be feature releases and really will need more testing. Because of this it makes sense IMO for desktop/workstation users to run everything unstable and manually mask things in a blacklist fashion where needed, rather than rely upon Gentoo's whitelisting of old, tested, but not necessarily more stable software. Same concept applies to Debian and other distros which use a similar scheme for separating new and tested packages.

Try to think of them as "New, probably stable, but might cause distro-specific conflicts", and "Old, but tested and won't break anything", rather than "Stable" and "Unstable".

Most Gentoo users don't get too excited about Gentoo release media like livecds. There is nothing special about them. Most of the Gentoo users I know don't even use Gentoo's livecds for installing Gentoo. The release media really doesn't have anything to do with Gentoo as a system (unlike most other versioned distros).

I really don't think I could handle the release cycle of Ubuntu or opensuse. Gentoo pretty much lets you install whatever you want whenever you want without its own redundant quality control getting in the way. That's the job of upstream, not your distro.

[reavertm]

We couldn't hold Gentoo Ten release any longer so we needed to put ~amd64 and ~x86 KDE4 (along with some stuff) to LiveDVD.
Actually now it's not a problem anymore as KDE4 is marked stable for those two architectures in Gentoo so it's what typical user can get.