Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for retirement of old gentoo 'versions'

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 22:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Barry Shaw said:
> > Is there any policy/ideas/consensus among developers about how long a
> > particular "version" will remain supported in portage?  If not, it might
> > be a useful idea to set sunset dates for particular "versions" of gentoo
> > (as I doubt they are all going to be supported indefinitely).  If there
> > is a clear end date, it prevents anyone being caught out unexpectedly.
> 
> I generally keep a minimum of two ebuilds in, so testing for a newly
> introduced problem is easier. If I put out seven ebuilds in two weeks for
> some ungodly reason, I don't expect to be maintaining some sort of minimum
> lifetime for each ebuild -- just the newest two will stick around.
> 
> We have no policy stating a minimum support lifetime for any given version
> right now (AFAIK, of course), despite a push for it amidst emphasis for
> Gentoo in the enterprise.

As Donnie said, there is no policy laid out.

In general, I will keep 2 versions in portage.  Usually it is a stable
version, and a testing version.  Depending on the ebuild, I will leave
more versions.  For example, look at PXES or VMware Workstation.  PXES
is something that would be in use and probably not easily upgraded for
everyone, so I have left every stable version in portage since I added
the package.  VMware Workstation is a licensed product, so I leave one
version per license in the tree (3.x and 4.x).  There are currently 2
4.x ebuilds simply because one is still in testing.

Then you have packages like gcc/glibc, which usually stay in the tree
for much, much longer.

With an enterprise version of Gentoo, there will need to be much more
help in maintaining certain packages, simply because patches will need
to be back-ported to older versions and other such headaches that most
other distributions must deal with.

Right now, we simply don't have the manpower to keep up with such
things, which is why we do not make things version dependent, where
possible.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering QA Manager/Games Developer
Gentoo Linux

Is your power animal a penguin?

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