[gentoo-dev] Wishlist: an automated package upgrade system with fine-tunable sysadmin control

[Kevin]

Pasted from bugzilla.  Please pardon the ugly newline formatting.


I'm a longtime (>10 yrs) Linux admin and I've been using Gentoo for
perhaps 2
years and I'm super impressed with Gentoo, having gotten very annoyed
with the
rpm-based nightmare upgrade situation presented by most of the other
distros,
but one thing I'd really like to see in Gentoo is a way of safely keeping my
Gentoo boxes up to date in an automated way.  I know that may sound
paradoxical
and mutually contradictory.  I realize that production systems should not be
upgraded before trying out the upgrade on a testbed system, but I've
found that
routine cron jobs of emerge world are unsafe because some packages need a
human's attention for upgrading (like apache or postfix when config files
should be left untouched or updated or merged with new config files or some
other issue that needs a human's attention) whereas doing nothing for a long
time (while the portage tree evolves) makes for a box that has been
veritably
left behind, sometimes making it difficult or impossible to upgrade.

I'd like to have the capability of being able to list some packages that
should
never be upgraded automatically (I realize I can do this to some degree
already
with portage), some others that are very unlikely to break from an automated
upgrade and thus should always be upgraded automatically, and some packages
(which may fit in either or both of these categories) that must be
upgraded in
a certain order in order to avoid breaking something and thus, should
probably
be upgraded automatically or (if flagged for preventing automatic
upgrades by
the admin) should be brought to the attention of the admin (say with an
email
to root or something) as needing attention to avoid breakage.

I am asking for this feature after having spent an entire weekend upgrading
various packages by hand, one or a few at a time, after carefully
considering
whether or not it would be safe to upgrade this or that package, and after
having (lazily) not upgraded anything on this production box in a long
time.
The experience has left me rather exhausted (with a sore ass from
sitting down
for so long) and wishing for something better.  One noteworthy experience in
particular is that I found that many packages suffered sandbox violations on
attempted upgrades, and I troubleshot this problem for a long time before it
occurred to me that I might want to upgrade the sandbox package and then try
upgrading these packages.  That solved the sandbox violation problem.
It seems
to me that this was a case where an automated system could have insisted on
upgrading the sandbox package first, before the others.  Perhaps there
should
have been a dependency, so that when I tried to upgrade the ncurses
library, it
automatically pulled in the newer sandbox package as a prerequisite (for
that
is what it turned out to be).

After writing this much, it occurs to me that perhaps the capabilities
that I
describe here may already be in Gentoo/portage in some way that I've yet to
fully discover and/or utilize, but despite having installed many Gentoo
systems
and read the Handbook (and many other Gentoo docs) many times, I've yet
to see
a good write-up on how to do what I describe here.  And perhaps the fact
that
the sandbox package was not a dependency for the ncurses package (and
several
others that also broke during emerge with sandbox violations) was the real
"bug" so to speak, rather than the idea that Gentoo is missing this major
feature that I'm asking for.  I'm really not sure which might be true, but I
just thought I'd ask.

One thing that I'm pretty sure is currently not possible with portage,
however, and that I'd definitely like to see as a part of this idea is a
way of setting thresholds on version numbers of packages in portage such
that the automated upgrade system will only upgrade a package
automatically if the difference in version numbers between the installed
package and the newest available package in portage is greater than some
admin-tunable amount.  For example, I might not want to upgrade emacs or
xemacs just because a new -r number becomes available.  Maybe I don't
want to have such a big package upgraded automatically unless there is a
new major or minor version number.

Thanks again to all the developers who have made Gentoo.  It's a really
terrific distro.


------- Comment #1 From Radek Podgorny 2006-04-24 08:25 PST [reply] -------

Maybe, the packages themselves could be assigned something like a
safe-upgrade-flag...


------- Comment #2 From Jakub Moc 2006-04-26 08:46 PST [reply] -------

Please, take such ideas to portage/devel mailing lists... Bugzilla is
not the
best place to discuss abstract ideas. Thanks.

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