gnome compilation problems

[Ryan Schmidt]

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.