I love Gentoo, and I would like to have a stable system.

My understanding is that long term support versions (such as Linux version 2.6.32) are more stable than the latest versions (like 2.6.34.)

Is there a parameter to tell Portage to select only long term support versions, or would I have to use package.mask on each package individually?

If not, how would this feature best be implemented? Should this be an emerge parameter (ACCEPT_KEYWORDS?) or a separate profile?

Thank you for any help.

Well, I guess this would be a question for someone who's more knowledgeable than me in which regards releases, LTS and QA.

I suggest you to ask at the gentoo-users mailing list or the Portage & programming subforum at forums.gentoo.org, since this is a very specific question that I can't correctly answer.

In general we consider that "arch" is "stable", and a newer official release of the kernel is usually also more stable than an old one, since a lot of bugs are fixed on every release. It's hard to tell if 2.6.x.40 is more or less stable than 2.6.x+2.1, though. I guess it depends on the concrete releases we are comparing, that's where the distribution mechanisms get in the middle. In Gentoo any package not in ~arch is considered stable.

Profiles could be a good way to fine tune out this a bit more, in fact maybe what you are looking for is one of the server profiles. You can use "eselect profile list" to list the available profiles (you need app-portage/gentoolkit installed to use the equery tool).

Hi,
This sort of things is what I do in package.mask.

I prefer to only install new kernel source when I am ready to compile it. Also --depclean might remove old kernel sources that you might still use. So e.g. I have just updated to 2.6.34-r1. So I have entered ">sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.34-r1" in package.mask, to mask all later kernels. I also run on stable by default (ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86")
, so this will stop later stabilized kernels from being installed when I update world.
I have to edit this when I decide to upgrade the kernel.

A few other packages also require extra actions after emerge, like e.g. gcc and python, so I tend to mask those too and then check for upgrades for those specifcally from time to time.

Mons