Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Versioning the tree

[Stuart Herbert]

On 11/28/06, Andrew Gaffney <agaffney@g.o> wrote:
> You make it sound like releng doesn't care at all about non-desktop packages.

That wasn't how it was meant.  Was simply meant as a statement of
fact.  Releng activities are currently exclusively desktop-oriented.
Until that changes, releng snapshots aren't fit for the purpose of
being a non-moving tree, as far as servers are concerned.

> The reason for the "exclusivity" is that the media that's typically built for
> release (GRP, LiveCD) is targetted for the largest audience...desktop users. If
> someone wants to volunteer to create a set of server-related GRP and a server
> LiveCD (as silly as this is for most things), they wouldn't be blocked outright.

I'd like to see some figures proving that our largest audience is
desktop users.  I'm not prepared to take that on faith.  (Alas,
producing these figures is non-trivial in the extreme, if not
impossible).

> > b) Release trees have a nasty habit of picking up last minute changes
> > (such as gcc 4.1) to suit the release, not stability.
>
> Gcc 4.1.1 wasn't a last minute change.

I can't agree with you there.  It doesn't matter how many months of
planning and work you guys put into getting gcc-4.1 fit for stable.
If you're doing it off in your own little corner of the world, and
then springing it on the rest of us just days before the release
happens, then to the much larger dev community, it comes as a last
minute change.

If you're "testing the crap" out of something, but only in an
exclusively desktop-oriented way ... well, that can only really be
partial testing, can't it?

> The "release tree" isn't really for minimal breakage.

But that is what Steve (who started this thread) asked for.  And what
he has asked for in his previous thread too.

> The *real* intent (at
> least from my POV) is to have a non-moving target for vendors to certify their
> software against (wouldn't it be nice for Oracle to be actually supported on
> Gentoo 2007.0 or something like that?),

Well, there's a dichotamy here.  Sun were able to certify Gentoo
against their hardware without such a tree.  Has anyone approached
Oracle and asked them what their actual requirements are?  Do Oracle
actually want to certify Oracle on Gentoo at all?

I personally deplore this habit of trying to second guess what someone
else wants.  Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.  Let's see an
email to -dev from someone at Oracle w/ their shopping list of needs,
and then base the discussion around that.

> and so admins don't have to do the
> "upgrade dance" once a week or even every day (like I do).

A slower-moving tree will substantially reduce this amount of work,
but it isn't going to go away, unless your boxes are on a private
network w/ no local security threats at all.

There'll always be GLSA's to respond to.  That's another issue that
needs to be handled w/ a slow-moving tree.  Are you going to restrict
changes in the slow-moving tree only to changes against a GLSA?

> The "non-stagnant" nature of Gentoo isn't the only reason that people use
> Gentoo. People use Gentoo for the configurability and customizability. As
> someone who admins more than a handful of Gentoo servers, I would absolutely
> *love* the combo of Gentoo's flexibility and a non-moving tree to make upgrades
> easier to deal with.

I honestly don't think you're ever going to get that out of Gentoo,
because of the lack of backporting.  Can you live with a slower-moving
tree?  Or do you personally really need a non-moving tree?

If you really need a non-moving tree, I think you're better off with
RHES or Ubuntu.

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list