On Fri, 5 Mar 2010 13:12:17 -0500 nixlists <nixmlists@gmail.com> wrote:

quoted text
> Anyway, at least one person has this opinion:
> 
> "Yes, a basic understanding, plus the understanding that you need to
> "catch" a set of commits completely.  That requires some understanding
> of the code at some level.  Fortunately messing that up only means
> that you have to wait and update again, and not make the mistake of
> posting on a mailing list that something is wrong.  I just did this,
> with the new distributed package builder that Marc Espie has
> redone--had I paid more attention,  I would have seen that new stuff
> was added, which fixed the particular problem I had."
> 
> Would it be ok to say that -current is probably not a good idea on
> production systems, for some people (who for whatever reasons can't do
> what is recommended in the above comment). I am not a C/*nix
> developer, should I really risk running current in production because
> I may not understand which snapshot to run?

That opinion came from STeve Andre'.

The thing is, you've kind mixed things up because you didn't understand
the context. STeve was doing *more* than just running the -current
snapshot and packages. He was getting into -HEAD branch to help espie@
out with testing of the new super cool toy, dpb3 (distributed package
building). It was clearly announced as "totally experimental for 4.7"
by espie@ on the ports@ mailing list.

Not many people have the bandwidth and stack of systems required to do
distributed builds of the *ENTIRE* ports tree. None the less, great
people doing bulk builds is how your packages get built for all the
mirrors. At present, they're still using the reliable old dpb rather
than the new "experimental" one because the latter is still under heavy
development and still needs more testing.

Similarly, if you're running -stable, the first thing to do when you
hit a bug is see if you replicate the bug on -current before reporting
it. Assuming it's not already fixed, you're probably going be given a
patch to test... --Guess what, that comfy warm place you use for
"production" systems (called -stable) is no longer what it was.

If you think about the above for a moment, ya, you'd eventually be
running -current and occasionally, -current+test_patches.