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

[Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org>]

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On 07/03/04  Dylan Carlson wrote:

> On Friday 02 July 2004 5:37 pm, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> It wouldn't turn everyone into profile maintainers -- it would just
> ensure that no ebuild gets removed accidentally that is required by a
> profile, by repoman's QA check.  If that ebuild *needs* to be removed
> for any reason (let's say a vulnerability) then it would be up to the
> arch herds to update their profile(s) accordingly -- not up to the
> herd/maintainer of the package.

One major problem with version pinning in the profiles is that the
packages file is an *inclusion* mask, so if you specify one exact
version portage won't allow users to use any other version of that
package. I don't think that we want to force specific versions on users.
If we do so they will start to modify the profiles locally which would
be an even worse problem.
I could also imagine some problems related to the current implementation
of stacked profiles, but that's implementation specific.
If you only want a repoman check I'd rather recommend to introduce a new
file that contains names and versions of packages that have to be in the
tree for that profile, but anyway this needs a GLEP before it could be
considered.

Marius

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