Re: [gentoo-dev] Revisiting GLEP 19

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

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|
| So, with that said, thoughts, comments and other ideas are welcome.
|

So far most of the discussion seems to center around stable portage as
snapshots of the main tree taken at regular intervals.  These snapshots
contain only packages marked as stable, and only security updates are
applied to the snapshots.

It might be worth considering instead a model where a snapshot is taken
then only security patches are applied, with the exception that should a
particular version of an application become depreciated, it can then
also be upgraded (provided the upgraded version is also considered stable).

This would enable snapshots to last for a longer period (I think four a
year is going to be too much work), it prevents any requirement for
backporting (which I think is a bad idea as it makes ebuild maintainers
into application maintainers) and it would also make the maintenence of
older snapshots more viable as there would be less work to do in general.

Some of the current discussion on the length of time snapshots are
maintained is concerning as production servers, in my experience, remain
in the same state for years - a one year maintenence period is not long
enough (it would be for workstations however as these are easier to take
out of service for an hour or so and upgrade).

In reality, if a application on a production server reaches a state
where it is unmaintained in favour of a newer version, then its likely
that the admins would upgrade the application to the supported version.
~ Most responsible program maintainers provide upgrade paths anyways, so
as long non security related package upgrade wasn't forced on
subscribers to the stable tree, it shouldn't be too bad.  At the least
if such a change could be signalled, people would be prepared.

I guess what I'm describing isn't strictly an enterprise gentoo (which I
don't think the community has the resources to support), more of a
slowed down version of the main portage tree.  In my experience
maintaining a couple of hundred of gentoo machines centrally, its the
rapid pace of change in the main tree that causes problems.  We only
only upgrade packages for security reasons, but whenever we do this, we
are forced to upgrade a multitude of other packages because they've
dropped out of portage.  If we only had to upgrade packages for security
and depreciation reasons it would make for a much more stable
environment for the end users (which is what we're after ultimately) and
~ it would make maintenence more manageable.

Baz


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