Re: [gentoo-dev] Init systems portage category

[Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury@gmail.com>]

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2009/10/12 Jesús Guerrero <i92guboj@terra.es>

>
> But there's one... That what the "system" set is about in first place. We
> could argue if creating a new category would be any good or not, that's a
> different issue. But there's already a list of packages that's considered
> critical for a Gentoo system. That's what "system" is, and you will get a
> big red waning when trying to uninstall one package belonging to this
> category.
>

My point would be that the selection criteria isn't particularly
robust/strict.  Iptunnel, df or du for example are not required to the best
of my knowledge for system booting or emerges.  Dev-lang/python is on the
other hand required for emerging (and is not a "sys" package).  I'm also not
sure that the warnings are strict enough.  In order to upgrade a package
(util-linux I think) recently I had to unmerge a library package on which it
depended but which conflicted with an upgrade to said library.  The unmerge
of the library package broke either fsck or mount (I can't remember which).
Had I tried to reboot before the upgrade was completed there would have been
problems.

Big "red warnings" are of no use when one is doing semi-automatic-upgrades
(and colored encodings are normally disabled when one dumps the emerge
output to a file).  What is needed is a separate indicator in emerge outputs
indicating that an upgrade is potentially "Dangerous" or should require
"Manual" intervention.  Anyone who is not a full time developer but who
wants to maintain a relatively up-to-date Gentoo system (which IMO is its
primary advantage over "packaged" releases such as RedHat, Ubuntu, etc.) is
going to want to automate the nightly emerges as much as possible such that
no user intervention is required.  And that probably works 90% of the time.
But there are those 5% of emerges that fail "reasonably" and require some
intervention (e.g. bug reports) and those 0.1-1% of emerges that fail (or
even succeed) with potential problems that could cost the user days.  It is
that final category (and it isn't every binary produced by a sys* package)
that I am suggesting warrants more attention.

Robert

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