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On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 21:12, Eric Sammer wrote: |
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> No. Even if you don't remove old ebuilds, you still have the other end |
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> of the stick where new updates are being released too fast for |
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> "enterprises." |
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There's nothing that forces you to take those updates!!! |
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That's a crucial point - and the major difference between Gentoo and |
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Debian unstable. People who do `emerge -U world` in a cron job every |
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night are, effectively, living the world of Debian unstable - they are |
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"forced" to take the newest revisions of things, no matter what. |
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|
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But there's nothing that says you have to run that command - and nothing |
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that will force an upgrade so long as the dependencies <=, >= are |
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*really* set properly. |
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I come across people who have 50-200 packages that "need upgrade" (ie, |
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for which there are newer versions available) - but their system is |
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perfectly stable, and they're perfectly happy. They let it be for months |
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or more. It *is* a touch annoying when ebuilds for their installed |
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software suddenly disappear. |
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|
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Myself, even on my personal systems I only do system wide upgrades about |
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once a quarter - say, when a new version of GNOME comes out. Spot |
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upgrades, sure, I do them all the time. But because of the fact that |
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Gentoo tends to be really good with dependency mapping, I keep a nice, |
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stable system. |
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So I repeat my original statement - keep old ebuilds around, and we're |
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done. |
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|
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AfC |
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Sydney |
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[Ok, this is the P.S. so I can muse about implementation for a moment: |
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** since removal of old ebuilds is somewhat motivated by trying to save |
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space on our mirrors, then yes, a separate place (archive to be |
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PORTAGE_OVERLAY'd, different tree, whatever) makes sense. Do that, then |
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the issue of # of years goes away if you simply don't ever delete old |
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versions from the archive. |
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|
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Also, I tend to like comments about "if you need that degree of |
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stabiltiy, then just maintain a local tree copy". Gentoo doesn't quite |
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out-of-the-box facilitate that behaviour, but any medium-large site is |
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going to be doing that as part of staging their deployments to |
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production - for caching reasons if no other. |
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|
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-- |
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Andrew Frederick Cowie |
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Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd |
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|
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Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 |
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|
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http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ |
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