Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: GLEP 19 -- Gentoo Stable Portage Tree

[Andrea Barisani]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 03:32:14PM -0500, Lisa Seelye wrote:
>
> What I think would be beneficial is to have a variable inside the
> make.conf  (and make.globals) to the effect of:
>
> QUARTERLY_UPDATE_FREQUENCY='12'  # update once every 3 years
> QUARTERLY_UPDATE_FREQUENCY='-1'  # never update
> QUARTERLY_UPDATE_FREQUENCY='0'  # update whenever there is a new update
> (current behavior)
>
> This would necessitate a file to tell Portage when the last quarterly
> update was applied.
>
> You may ask "Why even have these variables?"  With security updates it
> may be beneficial to have `emerge -u world' imply the following logic:
>
> Basically:
> if (quarters elapsed since last full update > quarter limit) then
>  apply all updates
> else if (security updates are available) then
>  apply all security updated updates
> else
>  do nothing
> fi
>
> (I can draw a diagram if necessary...)


I personally like this kind of approach. In fact I think that we should not
complicate things by adding a lot of 'stable' keywords, not to mention 'stability
levels', they are good concepts in theory but they would create more problems
than they solve.

Some sort of automation integrated with some kind of 'production stable'
keywords/tag would be easy to maintain leaving to ebuild mantainers only
the responsability of overriding those make.conf settings when major updates are 
accomplished (security related and/or critical ones).

So basically we have:

if (quarters elapsed since last full update > quarter limit) then
 apply all updates
else if (security updates are available) then
 apply all security updated updates
else if
 new production tagged ebuild
 apply updates
else 
 do nothing
fi


Hope this does not sound too silly :)

Bye

-- 
Andrea Barisani <lcars@g.o>                            .*.
Gentoo Linux Infrastructure Developer                          V
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GPG-Key 0x864C9B9E http://dev.gentoo.org/~lcars/pubkey.asc   (   )
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