Re: [gentoo-server] requirements for a more stable portage tree

[Kurt Lieber]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 11:35:18PM +1030 or thereabouts, stephen white wrote:
> No expectation of that happening. I'm thinking more along the lines of
> each baseline tracking the stable releases of packages, ceasing to be
> updated when those packages have their final releases.
>
> Eg, baseline 2003.4 might have been tracking Gimp 1.2 when it was
> current, therefore it will never go to Gimp 1.3 or Gimp 1.4, only to
> the very last release of Gimp 1.2.

OK, this is an interesting idea, but (if I understand you correctly) it
seems to go against what a lot of other folks have been asking for.

If I can rephrase what I think you're suggesting, you'd like to see a
series of portage snapshots (2004.0, 2004.1, etc.) that are not frozen, per
se, but are instead continually updated with minor version bumps of various
packages.  So, using your example of gimp and 2003.4, if 2003.4 is released
with gimp 1.2.5 and then, later on, 1.2.{6,7,8,9} are also released as
'stable' they would be added into that 2003.4 branch as well?  But gimp
1.3+ would never be added?

I personally don't like that idea and I'll give you a real-world example
why.  We have three web nodes atm.  They all run the following software:

AxKit 1.6.1
libxslt 1.0.31
libxml2 2.5.6

That particular combination works.  I know it works.  It has worked for
months. However, if I upgrade either libxslt to 1.0.33 or libxml2 to 2.5.8,
Weird Stuff starts happening and my life quickly becomes unpleasant.  I'm
sure the issues are fixable, but the point is that even minor version bumps
can cause serious problems with production systems.  In my mind, that
defeats the purpose of a stable/frozen tree.

That said, I'd be curious to read what others think.

--kurt