Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Wishlist: an automated package upgrade system with fine-tunable sysadmin control
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:13:19
Message-Id: 1146071071.32740.5.camel@cgianelloni.nuvox.net
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Wishlist: an automated package upgrade system with fine-tunable sysadmin control by Kevin
1 On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 12:29 -0400, Kevin wrote:
2 > One thing that I'm pretty sure is currently not possible with portage,
3 > however, and that I'd definitely like to see as a part of this idea is a
4 > way of setting thresholds on version numbers of packages in portage such
5 > that the automated upgrade system will only upgrade a package
6 > automatically if the difference in version numbers between the installed
7 > package and the newest available package in portage is greater than some
8 > admin-tunable amount. For example, I might not want to upgrade emacs or
9 > xemacs just because a new -r number becomes available. Maybe I don't
10 > want to have such a big package upgraded automatically unless there is a
11 > new major or minor version number.
12 >
13 > Thanks again to all the developers who have made Gentoo. It's a really
14 > terrific distro.
15
16 Jakub meant the portage-devel mailing list, not this one.
17
18 Anyway, most of this can be done already using /etc/portage files and
19 some well-written cron scripts. You can lock down versions of specific
20 packages quite easily using your own package.mask and package.unmask
21 files, along with package.keywords. However, one thing you can *never*
22 do is assume that *any* package that has *any* kind of configuration
23 files or is a library will *never* change in an incompatible way.
24
25 Basically, what you want is the assurances of a binary distribution that
26 things will "just work" when upgraded, yet you still want the power of
27 Gentoo. Honestly, I don't see portage ever being able to really support
28 anything like this so long as the tree continues to change. It simply
29 doesn't seem to be compatible with how Gentoo development is done. Then
30 again, I could be completely off my rocker and the portage team might
31 already have all of this implemented in some super-secret internal-only
32 version. As I said, this would probably be best conversed with them on
33 the portage-devel list.
34
35 --
36 Chris Gianelloni
37 Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
38 x86 Architecture Team
39 Games - Developer
40 Gentoo Linux

Attachments

File name MIME type
signature.asc application/pgp-signature

Replies