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

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 14:56 -0600, James Potts wrote:
> This looks good on the surface, Chris, but what happens in the case
> where somebody wants to use the Release tree, but also wants (or
> needs) one or more packages from the Live tree, and doesn't want to
> switch completely over to the live tree?  If I understand what you
> want to do correctly, the Release tree would include only stable
> packages.  Other packages wouldn't just be masked, they would be
> completely unavailable to anybody using that tree.

Correct.  The whole concept of the release tree is it is a complete
package.  All of the parts are supposed to work together.  There's
*nothing* that is not considered stable.  If you need other packages,
you add them to an overlay and support them yourself.

> I like the idea of having a stable p.mask much better, which says
> "profile" to me.  Any thoughts on a special profile just for releases?

It is completely unworkable with the 11,000+ packages we currently have
in the tree, whereas an automated script that parses the current tree is
much simpler.  Quite simply, when GLEP19 was being worked on, it became
painfully obvious almost immediately that even with the 10+ people who
volunteered to work on it, that it would be impossible to maintain a
profile-based system.  We estimated that it would take us more than
twice as many developers working on *only* the stable tree than we had
working on the "live" tree to even keep up.

To put it simply, I have *zero* interest in any profile/mask-based
concepts for providing "stable" as they don't work.  All they do is
create an enormous bottleneck and a massive amount of workload for every
single developer.  With the release trees, essentially only those
interested in supporting the tree are required to work on it.  The tree
is created entirely by scripts and is tested *before* it's released on
the public.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation