Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: stabilizing expat 2.0.0

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 13:48 -0400, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> >> No.  It would have been ideal if we would have done it with the release.
> >> Now, it means people *will* need to use revdep-rebuild as soon as they
> >> install their shiny new system if they use binary packages.  People
> >> coming from stage3 would be fine, of course.
> >>
> >
>
> I would have been happy to do that, but honestly Chris, the thought of approaching
> you and asking you to bump something like that into 2007.0 scared the crap out of
> me.  You seemed way overburdened for the release as it was.

I can totally understand this feeling.  Releases are stressful.

At the same time, I want to make sure that nobody feels afraid to come
to us with things like this.  Releases are the perfect time to make
changes that would otherwise be intrusive, since we can use the profiles
to make these sorts of changes, keeping them from affecting users until
they're ready.  We fully encourage people to come to us with changes
like this so we can help ease transitions for our users.  After all, new
releases are generally just a media refresh, but if we can use them to
make things better for our users, we should.

> I have no problem waiting for 2007.1, if Gnome and KDE don't mind.  I don't know
> what hackery has to take place to do that, but I'm sure someone out there does.

It's simple.  You mask expat-2.0.0 on all the current profiles, we mark
it stable in the snapshot and don't have it masked in the 2007.1
profile.  When we release (actually right before), we mark the package
stable in the tree.  We document the expat upgrade as part of the
profile upgrade guide, and we're done.  Users using a <=2007.0 profile
never see the upgrade.  New users use the new expat.  Users changing to
the 2007.1 profile run revdep-rebuild.

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