Re: [gentoo-dev] Revisiting GLEP 19

[Dylan Carlson]

On Wednesday 21 July 2004 11:38 am, Lina Pezzella wrote:

> I agree completely with this suggestion.  Personally at my workplace, my
> boss was considering going with debian because you could specify to only
> update for security reasons (through only placing security repositories
> in sources.list).  Fortunately for me, he had a few bad experiences with
> debian developers and went with gentoo despite the lack of the
> security-updates-only option.  Adding an [S] option to emerge -pv would
> certainly make our lives easier here, and at many corporations who don't
> see the need to update regularly.
>

Friends, making Gentoo enterprise-ready is bigger in scope than just 
handling security updates.  If all you want to do is to check for security 
updates, merge gentoolkit and use 'glsa-check'.

It would be good to clarify what the goals are here, and what the specific 
issues are that need addressing.

For the many of the IT shops who need more than a way to isolate security 
updates, I'll try to summarize with one word (I think) fits:  predictable.   
That means:

- knowing what each release contains (in detail, with version #s)
- understanding what pkgs will get enhancements, and which ones will only 
get security updates & major bugfixes.
- having enough information to know what a change specifically contains
- a regular, time-based release schedule (such as every six months); thus 
an organization can time & plan its infrastructure changes with expected 
OS updates.
- knowing that Gentoo does regression testing of security updates & major 
bugfixes back through old (but supported) releases before committing.

... and etc, etc.  This isn't a quick tweak to 'emerge', or a gentoolkit 
utility.  I wish it were that simple.  It involves improving Gentoo's 
practices and procedures, as well as enhancing portage to accommodate the 
necessary functions an enterprise customer receives currently with other 
operating systems, and expects ... (short of having paid commercial 
support).

There are some things we can do-- because of Portage itself-- that set us 
apart from other distributions.   Minimize the need for paid support.  
That should be, IMO, the underlying goal of this effort -- to give the 
users the enterprise tools they need to be self-reliant (i.e., not shoot 
one's self in the foot).

Beyond that we need to start looking helping sites with large numbers of 
Gentoo machines with deployment and administration tools.  No need to 
write our own stuff, the tools are already out there.  We just need to 
package and integrate them with how we do things in Gentoo, and write 
enough supporting documentation.

Cheers,
Dylan Carlson [absinthe@g.o]
Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x708E165F

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