[gentoo-dev] Re: GLEP 55 Version 2

[Duncan]

Richard Freeman <rich0@g.o> posted 4A2BAAA9.4030503@g.o,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:55:21 -0400:

> As far as an upgrade path goes - we could provide a one-time tarball
> that will update portage (and its essential dependencies) to a version
> that can get users out of this bind.  If a user has a system THAT old
> then they might just want to extract a stage1 tarball (manually -
> without overwriting /etc without care) and go from there.

We've done the tarball thing a couple times before, with portage I think, 
with amd64/gcc for certain, as it was needed to get out of some sort of 
multilib and profile based bind IIRC, and with the in-tree profiles (from 
pre-cascade profiles) at least once too, IIRC.

> I'm not sure that gentoo generally supports graceful upgrades from very
> ancient systems to modern ones without keeping up to date.  Other
> distros can do it since they do ~annual releases and users could just
> apply those sequentially.  For portage we don't keep around all the
> files needed to do a sequential upgrade like this - if a user were to
> try to upgrade to a 3-year-old version of some package most likely it
> wouldn't be mirrored and upstream might not have it either.

AFAIK from what I've read here over the years, Gentoo tries to keep 
smooth in-tree upgrades to a year out.  Beyond that, we don't usually 
deliberately break it without some warning and a tarball or similar 
upgrade path for another six months to a year, but it's by no means 
guaranteed it'll be a smooth upgrade after a year even if we aren't 
deliberately breaking it.  Generally, beyond a year, it's recommended 
that one uses the stage tarball to get something at least operationally 
modern, and goes from there.

Simply put, Gentoo's NOT in practice a distribution for the folks who 
like to lollygag around for years between updates.  Tho we do try to 
support it up to a year out and to provide at least some form of likely 
non-routine upgrade option beyond that, it definitely works best and with 
the least trouble for those updating every month or at least once a 
quarter, with things getting progressively more difficult and troublesome 
the further out beyond that you go, simply because of lack of testing if 
nothing else.

> We obviously need to give some thought to not breaking old versions of
> portage, but given that portage will be only one of many problems if a
> user doesn't do an emerge -u world for 5 years I'm not sure we need a
> bulletproof solution...

I just realized that I'm right about at my Gentoo 5-year anniversary, 
with an original installation of 2004.1.  (I tried 2004.0 but it didn't 
work for some reason I never did figure out, but perhaps related to the 
then new NPTL, which I was trying to enable.)

I can't /imagine/ first installing it then, and coming back to it now, 
expecting anything but a full reinstall from stage tarball (assuming as 
suppose I would be if I had been that out of it, that was still even 
/using/ stage tarballs as it was then).  Imagine people wondering what 
happened to xfree86, among other things.  I mean, talk about a time-
traveler getting confused by the future!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman