Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: openrc portage news item

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:
> A proper SA avoids upgrade pathways were possible that require
> manual intervention.  This requires manual intervention.
>
> Said proper SA's also have a rather large hatred of anything that can
> leave a system nonbootable (rant: including crappy SA's who don't
> verify the !@#*ing thing comes back up in a proper hot/warm state).
> This qualifies for that.

This will be far from the first Gentoo upgrade which has required
either manual intervention, or which leaves the system in a
potentially-unbootable state.  Gentoo just generally doesn't offer the
level of handholding that you are asking for.  Users who want that
kind of experience may be better off with RHEL or another platform.

I think we need a reasonable balance here.  From what I've seen the
openrc upgrade seems pretty straightforward.  The only caveat is that
you need to read the instructions before doing it.  Nervous users
should burn rescue discs in advance.

I think the important thing is to widely announce the upgrade.  The
maintainers intend to do exactly this.  I have complained in the past
when maintainers have made disruptive changes without notice, or with
notice committed at the same time as the change (which means that if
your emerge --sync is in a cron job you first hear about it AFTER
running emerge -au world).  This isn't being done here.

I'm afraid that if we set the bar as high as you're proposing, then
nobody will ever get around to providing an Ubuntu-like level of
polish or whatever and we'll just end up with two baselayouts for the
next five years.  Keep in mind that ~arch having such major
differences from stable defeats some of the purpose of testing.  Sure,
if somebody worked hard I'm sure they could meet your level of polish
in a few weeks, but unless you're personally willing to do it I'm not
sure that the maintainers are going to be willing - this is a
volunteer organization so when you say "do it this way or don't do it
at all" you're more likely to get the latter than the former.

My feeling is that the openrc upgrade fragility is in keeping with the
general traditions of Gentoo - we expect Gentoo users to be reasonably
willing to get their hands dirty.  I'm more concerned with making sure
our users are INFORMED than hand-held.

And as far as "proper SAs" go - a "proper SA" always deploys changes
on a production-equivalent test environment anyway.  Most "proper SAs"
also make backups and VM snapshots so that a borked upgrade is just a
bump in the road.  "Proper SAs" also run on managed hardware so that
they can boot off of a rescue disc without being physically present.
Most of these "Proper SAs" also run RHEL anyway.  :)

Rich