On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 07:17 +1300, Jerome Brown wrote:
> Wont this cause headaches when it comes to depreciating profiles
> however? If there are very few changes between versions, I can forsee a
> time where someone wants to keep 2004.3, 2005.0, 2005.1, 2006.0, 2006.1,
> 2007.0, 2007.1 around because 2008.0 inherits from 2007.1 which inherits
> from ... (you get the idea). How would this work and how long would you
> be willing to keep a profile around for until it is removed and not just
> depreciated?

Well, we would need to have enough sense to migrate data when we
deprecate.  Once we deprecate 2004.3, we would copy the 2004.3 stuff to
2005.0 and break the inheritance on 2004.3 from 2005.0 and so on.

As for deprecation, I think we currently have a loose rule of 6 months
after deprecation for the profile removal.

> (I do think that multiple inheritance is A Good Thing (TM), especially
> if it becomes possible to have user defined profiles in
> /etc/portage/profiles which can inherit from multiple 'base' profiles)

The only real problem with user-provided profiles is the simplicity with
which a user could completely hose their system and our complete lack of
ability to troubleshoot problems with them.

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