On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 16:12, Daniel Robbins wrote: > > Sure, it sounds good, but will it ever get off the ground? > > I'm not convinced that this idea will take off... > > OK, we were talking about "GRP" -- the official, current definition here, > which is already off the ground, clearly works, and used by lots of people. > Several years ago, many Gentoo developers were against GRP as it exists > today, and it was a large uphill battle to push for the creation of binary > packages. What we are talking about is whether a possibility exists for > Gentoo to totally regress to that original state, with next to no pre-built > packages were available for our users. At this point, as Sven points out, > there would be a great amount of resistance to GRP being dropped entirely > (many users rely on GRP, the installer project is going strong, etc.) > > The stuff in GLEP 26 should be called something else, since it seems like > we're all getting confused about what everyone else is talking about. And I > agree with you in that it may not get off the ground any time soon. This > shouldn't prevent interested parties in trying to figure out how to get it > ("it" being binary packages to keep your system up-to-date) to work, though. > And I can certainly understand why infrastructure may not want to host a > comprehensive binary package update repository, since that could potentially > involve a huge commitment of both CPU and storage resources. So huge, in > fact, that it may be technically impossible to do as an official effort > under the Gentoo Foundation itself. > > But I think the incremental binary update _technology_ is worth having. A > lot of companies and educational institutions are trying to figure out how > to deploy Gentoo and keep all their machines up-to-date. If incremental > binary package updates are an option for them, I'm sure they'd appreciate > it. Now, I am not saying that _we_ would provide the binary packages to > them. We don't need to host the binary packages -- Gentoo can simply create > the technology, explain how to use it, and then interested companies and > universities can build their own package sets for their own internal use. > Then they have a very efficient way to keep their catalyst-built Gentoo > systems up-to-date. > > I bet that a handful will make their binary packages available to the > public. For some organizations, this would be appealing because additional > users would result in more QA over time, more bug reports, and the ability > to improve their binary package sets faster. I think that this is more > likely to happen in an academic setting, though. > > Just some ideas... > > Regards, > > Daniel > > > -- > gentoo-releng@gentoo.org mailing list Well said Daniel - GRP is here to stay because it is a user-popular viable install option. What I proposed in my document are the incremental updates. If we choose to go this route (which means I would completely rewrite that glep), then I like the way that Daniel laid out - make the techology available, document it, and let the users use it if they want to. Let me know what you think. Cheers, //zhen -- John Davis Gentoo Linux Developer ---- GnuPG Public Key: Fingerprint: 2364 71BD 4BC2 705D F338 FF70 6650 1235 1946 2D47