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

[Barry Shaw <baz@scms.waikato.ac.nz>]

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It looks like there are two separate issues here, packages in the
profiles being removed and an enterprise gentoo.  I'm mainly concerned
at the moment about pinned package versions in the profiles being
dropped out of portage which would break any machine build based on that
profile.

Given that in the 1.4 and 2004.0 profiles there is only one pinned
package, it doesn't look like a major - its probably something that just
~ the maintainer for that package should be aware of (some automated
check as previously mentioned would be a good safety net).  If there
were no pinned packages in the profiles, then as long as the cat-pkg
names didn't change, the profile would exist indefinitely with little
effort on any devs part.

Now I'm not suggesting that profiles should be kept forever, but if they
are made redundant with little or no notice, it can cause big problems
if you've got hundreds of machines installed with that profile.

That said, I think an enterprise gentoo is a good idea, but its not
something that the devs should be lumbered with on top of maintaining
ebuilds.  It sounds like there is more than enough to do already 8).
Can anyone point me in the direction of the people involved in
enterprise gentoo?  We've got about 250 machines currently gentooed,
with more to come, so we might be able to offer some insights into large
scale installations.

|
| The CVS branching / Gentoo Enterprise idea (to me) sounds
overengineered.
| I haven't done a survey of IT managers to see what their expectations
are,
| but in my 14 years, management, etc -- I know what /my/ basic
requirements
| are.
|
| 1/ Conservative defaults
| 2/ A regular, predictable release schedule
| 3/ Packages are not updated between releases, except in cases of
| vulnerabilities or major bugfixes
| 4/ In the event of #3, basic regression testing before the changes are
| committed
| 5/ Supporting documentation & tools geared towards enterprise deployment
|

I agree, if we can get a enterprise framework that exists within most of
the current gentoo infrastructure, that means less work for everyone,
and therefore a higher chance of a sustainable project.

A stable portage tree would be the single most useful thing here.  We
only re-sync our portage copy when security vulnerabilities are
announced, but due to the dynamic nature of the portage tree, this often
means upgrading lots of other packages in the process (e.g. mozilla 1.7
breaks epiphany which means a gnome 2.4 to 2.6 upgrade for us.  Not a
big deal, but something that needs to be communicated to users before hand).

Baz
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