Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for retirement of old gentoo 'versions'

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 09:44, William Kenworthy wrote:
> A few weeks back I filed a bug (since closed, but not resolved to my
> satisfaction) on the premature removal of mm-sources and the fact that
> no stable version was left in portage.  This had the effect of breaking
> a number of perfectly working systems and leaving no alternative but to
> move to another kernel as the masked versions did not work (at the time)
> - a major hassle.  Without a kernel of that package in portage, packages
> that depended on the installed kernel to build broke and couldnt be
> installed.

Unless there was a security problem, then there should always be a
stable version in portage once any version has ever become stable.  This
specific incident was not what is supposed to happen.

> I for one would like to see a policy for this as I feel that mm-sources
> was done at the whim of a dev who was looking at his future, and wasnt
> willing to consider the user base, leaving quite a number of us
> stranded.  His justification seemed to be that mm-sources should be
> considered a dev package, so I should not have bothered - bug closed.

You won't see a policy for this any time soon, as different packages
have different needs, and we don't have the man power to back port to
known broken releases just because of some arbitrary policy.

With that being said, your example had absolutely nothing to do with
such a policy, but rather with a policy that does exist to never remove
all stable versions of a package from portage without moving one of the
testing packages to stable.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering QA Manager/Games Developer
Gentoo Linux

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