Re: [gentoo-dev] Deprecate EAPIs 1 and 2?

[Dale]

Petteri Räty wrote:
> On 01/02/2011 11:04 PM, Joshua Saddler wrote:
>
>> Whatever you folks eventually settle on, please send patches and
>> suggestions to the GDP for our upgrade guide. I'd prefer that users
>> have a possible upgrade path from *any* profile/version of Gentoo up
>> through the present. If you decide not to support anything older than
>> version X and require reinstalling or some other set of procedures,
>> please let the GDP know via our ML or bugzilla.
>>
>>
> The current hard requirement is one year:
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20091109-summary.txt
>
> The follow up discussion probably didn't end up in any concrete
> decisions. If we want to actually make sure upgrades from old installs
> (>1 year) work then we should setup some kind of a bot doing upgrades.
> It would then provide the documentation for the upgrade path and make
> sure it keeps working.
>
> Regards,
> Petteri
>
>

As a regular reader of gentoo-user, if someone has not updated in more than a year, we almost always recommend a re-install.  Maybe save /etc, /home and the world file and then start from scratch on the rest.  As a user since the 1.4 days, I would never expect that much backward compatibility.  The OS just has to many changes to be able to do that.

Also, I think going back that far would mean holding up progress as well.  It's hard to move forward if all you worry about is the past.  It's good to learn from the past but not to use it as a boat anchor.

That said, if there was some radical change that required a reinstall and the grass was much greener on the other side, I would do it.  That's just me.  I'm not sure what would require that to happen but thought it worth mentioning.  I wouldn't want that to happen to often tho.  It's not like the install is point, click and walk away.  o_O

My $0.02 worth.

Dale

:-)  :-)