Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: Making backwards-incompatible tree changes | a solution for GLEP 55's problem
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:46:46
Message-Id: CAGfcS_npucf0Ue_bWo1Xo3sCa07C=G9j0ek5eXo7phRt3NpHog@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: Making backwards-incompatible tree changes | a solution for GLEP 55's problem by Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>
1 On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
2 > At least an initial read suggests that you just multiplied the mirror
3 > space requirements by however many times you use this trick.  I don't
4 > believe infra's going to go for that.
5 >
6
7 Yup - and everybody needs to mirror all the BINDISTs using all those
8 older trees. I don't think this is a good option all-around.
9
10 For most changes, honestly, I think the cleanest option is to use
11 binary packages. If you build a generic set of @system binary
12 packages then you can emerge -K them and get a bootstrappable system
13 no matter how out-of-date you are. Then you can do an emerge -uDN
14 world, or maybe just an emerge -e world.
15
16 The only real gotcha is if portage is so old that it can't handle the
17 binary packages. However, to get around that we really just need a
18 set of step-wise binary updates for portage itself so that you can
19 sequence it up to something that can install the rest. That will work
20 as long as portage doesn't strictly need a newer dependency. If it
21 needs a newer python or something then we might need to keep a binary
22 package of that lying around - maybe statically linked so that it
23 doesn't go further than a few packages.
24
25 Something like that really just needs a few tarballs and then an
26 up-to-date set of binary stage3 packages. The binary packages could
27 be built at the same time the stage3s are made. And, this is really
28 just a contingency plan so we don't need to mirror all that stuff - we
29 could even just make it torrent-only or something.
30
31 Or we could do what was proposed in the past and say 1 year and you're
32 done. That slows us down a little, but has zero overhead.
33
34 Rich

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