[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC v2: news item for the 17.0 profiles

[Duncan]

Andreas K. Huettel posted on Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:51:23 +0200 as excerpted:

> Am Mittwoch, 11. Oktober 2017, 06:24:44 CEST schrieb Alec Warner:
>>
>> "Please upgrade away from the 13.0 profiles in the next six weeks."
>>
>>
> Good idea. Here's what I wrote:
>
> Please upgrade away from the 13.0 profiles within the six weeks after
> GCC 6.4.0 has been stabilized on your architecture. The 13.0 profiles
> will be deprecated then and removed in half a year.

Looks good. =:^)

> [I'd very much like to remove them faster, but am not sure about upgrade
> paths and recommended deprecation times. It may become necessary to mask
> more and more packages in the 13.0 tree over the half year since devs
> will start to depend on c++11 only libraries...]

Ouch.  Good reason to ensure the upgrade is done, and a total of 7.5 
months from the last arch upgrade does seem reasonable.

Tho gentoo has historically tried to ensure at least a year's upgrade 
path, for those who have a year's military or volunteer service, during 
which they're away from their gentoo machines, for instance.

Personally, I have occasionally upgraded (secondary, off-net) machines 
after even longer (to 2.5 years, IIRC), but that has been while keeping 
my main machine current, so I had a memory of how to fix breakage and the 
configuration of the updated machine to reference while bringing the 
secondary machine current, a few packages at a time.

And my own position, based on that experience, is that if you've not been 
doing /any/ gentooing for anything close to a year, it's very likely that 
simply starting over with a new stage3, probably in a chroot so you can 
use the existing install until the new install is up and running, is 
going to be easier.

So 7.5 months does seem reasonable, to me at least. =:^)

-- 
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