I understand what you say, but I'm not sure I got my point across very well. Let's say I have a server that has various things installed like apache with the 2.0 branch, mysql with the 4.0 branch, and PHP with the
4.x branch. If I do an emerge -u world on a machine with these, at some random point in time when the devs decide the newer branch is stable, then any one of these will be upgraded to the next branch. What I am asking, is why wouldn't it be better to have it where I will only stay on the current branch for that profile, and only move to the next branch when I change the profile?
Like, say I have the 2005 profile, then I wouldn't have to worry about PHP upgrading to 5.0 or randomly requiring some virtual ebuild or whatever else is decided to be thrown our way. I would just have to worry about updating the
4.x branch at least until the devs decide to stop supporting it.
I think another advantage to using this method would be that it would make it easier to transition from an application that has a monolithic ebuild to suddenly having a modular ebuild, or a virtual ebuild. At least this way, we wouldn't have to worry about fundamental things changing on us during an update until we change the profile and can expect these kinds of changes and can deal with them at a more convenient time instead of when the devs decide it's time to for us.
Does that make any sense?
On 12/25/06, Andrey Gerasimenko <gak@kaluga.ru> wrote:
On Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:52:55 +0300, Mike Myers <fluffymikey@gmail.com>
wrote:
> In Gentoo, the system is updated while you are
> using it.
> This causes us users to modify whatever we're running to suit all these
> changes.
As far as I know, Gentoo releases a Reference Platform twice a year. So,
you can upgrade twice a year, once a year, once in two years - all as you
please. It will be similar to other distros, but better.
> I'd rather be able to specify that I'm using like
> the 2005
> profile, and then when I try to do emerge -u world, I don't have to deal
> with my applications going from one major version to another major
> version
> all by themselves and then breaking with no easy way to revert back.
As discussed recently in another thread of this list, there are ways to
get back easily, backup of the portage tree being one of them. However, I
guess your problem can be solved easier - just do not do -u world. Since
its goal is exactly to produce what you do not want, why should you? How
many packages do you really want to be the latest? If there are a few, it
is easy to update them individually; if there are many, you may create a
virtual package in the overlay and update it.
I do not here much about upgrade really breaking a Gentoo installation. If
it did, then a fresh install also would be broken, an extremely rare case
with stable arch. Thus, if something does not work after upgrade, then
configuration files are out of order. Gentoo already has everything
necessary to examine them one by one and fix as necessary.
> Please tell me there's some solution to this? I haven't seen one
> mentioned
> anywhere yet. Even with Gentoo's occasional problems, I like it too
> much to
> use any other distro but I'd definitely like to see better version
> management than what its got, which is none.
As far as I understand, no, there is no solution. If you upgrade any
software, you have to upgrade the dependencies and configuration. All that
can be offered, and is offered by many distros, is the upgrade option that
should work if you installed the distro and did not change anything. Even
that does not work pretty often, please read the reviews. For a Gentoo
user the reason is evident - they do not have dispatch-conf. Some vendors
have already stopped bragging that an upgrade does not break anything,
example - Vista.
--
Andrei Gerasimenko
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list