On Oct 24, 2007, at 13:19, Stefan Bruda wrote:
What amazes me is that every time GNOME is being updated a whole bunch of problems appear. For one thing dependencies need to be recompiled quite often (doable by hand only!). Some compilation errors are also invariably present. I am wondering why do I need to upgrade a stable GNOME installation to what always turns out to be an unstable GNOME, not ready for prime time. I would not do that personally, except that the port system asks me to do so. At least in this respect a branching into stable and development is sorely needed, as is a dependency rebuild utility.
Nobody forces you to upgrade any port, or any other software on your machine, for that matter. You can choose to upgrade, or not. That being said, new versions should be better than old ones. If you find problems with new versions, please file tickets. How would splitting the ports tree into stable and unstable help? Specifically, if we declare our current ports tree "unstable", by what mechanism does software get to the "stable" branch? Who decides what is stable and when? We currently have no information about how many of our ports even build currently, and of course that varies by OS and platform.