Stable/Testing branch in MacPorts

[Janosch Peters]

Hi there,

I use macports fot about 1.5 years now. Most things work great and MP 
has some lovely features like variants. However, it appears quite often 
that some ports are broken for various different reasons. E.g. the 
quartz variant of gtk2 lead to crashes in gimp2 and the bug was not 
fixed for several months.

I know that maintaining two branches is probably more work, but in 
contrast to most linux distros, using macports I cannot be sure that a 
port works if I install/upgrade it. (Of course you cannot be 100% sure 
using e.g. ubuntu/debian either, but at least those package have been 
tested for some time). In terms of stability the single macports branch 
feels a bit like the "unstable" branch in debian.

To make things even more annoying is the fact that there is no 
_straightforward_ way to downgrade to a previous version of the port. 
(I know that there is a way, but its not as easy as with apt-get for 
example).

Has maintaing two branches been already discussed on the list? 

cheers,
Janosch