Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for retirement of old gentoo 'versions'

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 11:15, Dylan Carlson wrote:
> I think the problem comes in is if you have done exhaustive testing against
> a specific profile, and subsequently want to deploy a series of new
> systems using that profile-- which worked at one time, but now is broken
> in one way or another because ebuilds were taken out of the tree.  This
> scenario is one of those "enterprise" problems, but one that I think could
> be solved through repoman checks.  Unless I'm completely mistaken about
> what's being discussed here.

While I can definitely see this position, nobody should consider Gentoo
to be 100% enterprise friendly without some leg work on the part of the
admin.  A "tested profile" would also have to include specific versions,
otherwise there is no way that a person could properly certify the
validity of the test.  The only way to ensure a stable (as in
non-moving) tree is to maintain a local tree, or to *never* sync.  In
both cases, the actions of the Gentoo development team should have
absolutely zero impact on the user.

We understand that this is a limitation of Gentoo, which is why a GLEP
was drafted for the "stable" tree and also why there is a group of
people working to bring "Enterprise Gentoo" to fruition.  Right now we
have no simple answer, other than for the administrator to be vigilant. 
After all, simply running an emerge sync and updating packages without
certifying each one is definitely not "enterprise" policy at any large
outfit.  No amount of repoman checking will solve this, as it is more of
a infrastructure problem than a technical one.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering QA Manager/Games Developer
Gentoo Linux

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