Stable/Testing branch in MacPorts

[Janosch Peters]

On 04-04-2010, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2010, at 08:01, Janosch Peters wrote:
>>  Has maintaing two branches been already discussed on the list? 

> Several times. I don't see that we have anywhere close to the
> (personnel) resources necessary to support such a thing. Almost 2700
> out of our almost 6800 ports are unmaintained; if we can't even
> maintain the ports we have in our single tree, how will we keep up
> with multiple trees? 

Good point. I wasnt aware that there are so many unmaintained ports.


> I also don't understand how you decide when to
> move something from unstable to stable. Logically, you do so when 
it's
> stable, meaning when it works all the time in every circumstance, but
> how do you know if it's working all the time in every circumstance if
> nobody has tested it because everybody's running the older version in
> the stable branch?

Well, it obviously works, because thats what every major linux 
distribution does. If there are enough people using a distro, there are 
always some people who use packages from the testing branch, and some 
of them are reporting bugs. If a package hasnt received bug reports for 
some time, it can be moved to stable. 

But this works only if there are enough users. Are there any estimates 
about how many people are using macports?