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

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 17:06, Dylan Carlson wrote:
> On Friday 02 July 2004 4:29 pm, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > A "tested profile" would also have to include specific versions,
> > otherwise there is no way that a person could properly certify the
> > validity of the test.
> 
> I agree.  The profiles only list ~70 packages and those versions aren't 
> pinned.  Although maybe they should be.  The difference between the 
> versions in a tested configuration/profile and what ends up getting 
> installed later should include security updates (backported security 
> fixes) -- which is not something we do right now...

...and I doubt that we ever will.  Gentoo tries to remain as much like
the upstream packages as possible, which means we're more likely to
require an upgrade than to back-port a patch.  This is the exact reason
why any plans for an enterprise version of Gentoo all focus on being a
separate project from Gentoo proper.  I know for a fact that I don't
want to waste the precious development time that I have doing the
mundane task of back-porting patches to some old version of a package
that I've long since forgotten.

> My point is that I believe we could address this (at least in part) by 
> pinning versions in profiles, and having repoman block commits that 
> attempt to remove ebuilds that are required by a profile.  It's not a new 
> idea.   This, instead of branching CVS.   Although I'm not opposed to that 
> idea either, but IIRC some devs are...

Pinning versions in the profiles sounds pretty cool, but it turns
*every* package maintainer and arch maintainer into a profile
maintainer, which I think is a bad idea.  It also bloats the portage
tree, since there would be multiple versions of every ebuild, compared
to the one or two for most packages that we have now.  I still think
that the "pinned" tree should be a separate branch.

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

Is your power animal a penguin?

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