Re: [gentoo-dev] Where to put prerelease vanilla kernels?

[Matt Rickard <frogger@gentoo.org>]

> 
> I fully support the opinions stated above, and I simply cannot
> comprehend what the big deal with ~arch masking vanilla-sources is.
> Even *considering* the option of a separate package is ridiculous. As
> long as developers are careful enough to not remove the ~arch mask
> from any _pre kernel, I am perfectly fine, and I believe there
> wouldn't be anyone who isn't fine. What are we trying to do-- make
> sure people who insist on running the *unstable* profile actually
> don't get the "unstable" sources. 

Well the fact is that an unstable kernel can be a whole lot more
problematic than an unstable userland package.  With userland, if it
crashes, oh well, you can start it up again.  With an unstable kernel
you run the risk of hard locks and corrupted filesystems.

I know that I've used vanilla-sources on some systems where I'm using
the ~arch profile, because I KNOW it will work correctly.  Sometimes I
don't want to mess around with experimental kernel patches.

There is also the package.mask if you feel that is
> not enough, but this was also mentioned already. And the decision that
> was taken is ... weird.  What is the idea in having unstable (i.e.
> ~masked) packages in the first place? Are you going to keep only
> stable versions in vanilla-sources? What's the point? 

The point is that vanilla-sources gets you stable release kernels all
the time.

>Why not move all
> _pre, _alpha ane _beta versions of packages in separate directories?
> As it was already mentioned, _pre kernels are more stable than many
> other packages. 

Well beta kernels already have their own category as
development-sources.  It is my understanding that this _pre category
will also contain _rc kernels.

>The first one I can think of is gentoo-sources, that
> insisted on corrupting my filesystem every now and then, so I couldn't
> upgrade my glibc, without upgrading to vanilla-sources first (some
> files were having funny contents during compilation but it was hard to
> reproduce), and I am running vanilla-sources ever since.

I hope you filed a bug report :)  I don't use gentoo-sources myself so I
can't comment anymore than that.

> 
> Sorry for the tone, but I feel frustrated.

No problem, you raise some issues that definitely do need to be
addressed.

--
Matt Rickard
frogger@gentoo.org


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