RE: [gentoo-releng] Gentoo 2004.1 Release

[Daniel Robbins]

> Sure, it sounds good, but will it ever get off the ground?
> I'm not convinced that this idea will take off...

OK, we were talking about "GRP" -- the official, current definition here,
which is already off the ground, clearly works, and used by lots of people.
Several years ago, many Gentoo developers were against GRP as it exists
today, and it was a large uphill battle to push for the creation of binary
packages. What we are talking about is whether a possibility exists for
Gentoo to totally regress to that original state, with next to no pre-built
packages were available for our users. At this point, as Sven points out,
there would be a great amount of resistance to GRP being dropped entirely
(many users rely on GRP, the installer project is going strong, etc.)

The stuff in GLEP 26 should be called something else, since it seems like
we're all getting confused about what everyone else is talking about. And I
agree with you in that it may not get off the ground any time soon. This
shouldn't prevent interested parties in trying to figure out how to get it
("it" being binary packages to keep your system up-to-date) to work, though.
And I can certainly understand why infrastructure may not want to host a
comprehensive binary package update repository, since that could potentially
involve a huge commitment of both CPU and storage resources. So huge, in
fact, that it may be technically impossible to do as an official effort
under the Gentoo Foundation itself.

But I think the incremental binary update _technology_ is worth having. A
lot of companies and educational institutions are trying to figure out how
to deploy Gentoo and keep all their machines up-to-date. If incremental
binary package updates are an option for them, I'm sure they'd appreciate
it. Now, I am not saying that _we_ would provide the binary packages to
them. We don't need to host the binary packages -- Gentoo can simply create
the technology, explain how to use it, and then interested companies and
universities can build their own package sets for their own internal use.
Then they have a very efficient way to keep their catalyst-built Gentoo
systems up-to-date.

I bet that a handful will make their binary packages available to the
public. For some organizations, this would be appealing because additional
users would result in more QA over time, more bug reports, and the ability
to improve their binary package sets faster. I think that this is more
likely to happen in an academic setting, though.

Just some ideas...

Regards,

Daniel


--
gentoo-releng@g.o mailing list