Re: [gentoo-dev] Revisiting GLEP 19

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 17:12, Olivier Crete wrote:
> I like the idea of a separate tree.. But if it really rarely changes,
> rsync is just overkill and will overburden our mirrors.. Lets just make
> it a tarball and put the enhancements in a rsync'ed overlay. Rsync is
> for stuff that changes...

That works for me.  I was simply trying to propose a way to do it with
the least amount of changes for the users.  Perhaps have the main
tarball delivered by rsync so a version switch is still transparent?

> This overlays should probably each have their own cvs module (or all be
> directories under the same module, I dont really care... Where all
> package maintainers would have access.. And then we can mark them stable
> using the same kind of procedures we currently use for GLSAs...
> 
> Also, the problem with maintaining older versions is that we need to
> have at least one machine available for each version where the concerned
> devs can test security updates.. Ok, maybe at least one per
> architectures using chroots... but its still a lot of  infrastructure..
> That's why reducing the number of stable releases to maybe even just one
> a year might be a good idea.

I'm not opposed to that.  I think I would prefer 2, simply to reduce the
amount changed between releases, making it easier for users to upgrade. 
Switching to 2 releases per year with a 4 release retention puts us at 2
years of support in the -release trees.  Switching to 1 year release
cycles puts us out to 4 years.  An awful lot can change in 4 years in
the Linux world.  I'm not sure we would possibly be able to keep up with
such a long-reaching goal.

Personally, I would say we try to move on this by 2005.0 and see what
happens, without changing release schedules and only supporting 4
releases.  This would carry us through 2005.X and into 2006.X, where we
could make adjustments to the release cycle if we deem it necessary.

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

Is your power animal a penguin?

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