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

[Dan Armak]

On Tuesday 03 February 2004 15:41, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 12:04:59PM +0200 or thereabouts, Dan Armak wrote:
> > A real separate cvs branch seems like a lot of extra work; most updates
> > going into the stable branch will probably also go into the main tree.
> > What am I missing?
>
> A key part of the GLEP is ensuring that ebuilds stay in the tree for a
> minimum of one year.  As has been proven time and time again, we don't have
> the necessary QA or control over our current tree to offer this feature, so
> I felt it was betetr implemented by offering a separate tree.

I've just heard more details on irc about the ebuild deletion problem. I have 
to say it gives me a very unpleasant feeling that we can't trust our devs not 
to delete necessary files (in this case, any files with stable keywords, very 
easy to check). And we're also accepting the fact that the main tree gets 
broken in this way once in a while. That's bad, regardless of the stable tree 
issue.

>
> Also, with one tree, we cannot offer atomic updates to our users.  That is
> to say, with one tree, there would have to be some period of time where the
> stable tree was 'in flux' as devs went through and marked new ebuilds
> stable.  With a separate tree, devs have an entire quarter where they can
> mark things stable at their leisure.  Then, at a pre-defined date, we pull
> those ebuilds and can offer one, consistent tree to those folks who want
> the stable branch.

We could use ~stable for the flux period, and mark a bunch of ~stable stuff as 
stable atomically.

> As for your question on transition, for 95% of all stable ebuilds, the path
> should be:
>
> ~arch --> arch --> stable:arch
>
> ~stable is there primarily for off-cycle updates.  If we need to issue a
> GLSA and updated ebuild with very little testing, it would be included in
> the stable tree marked as ~stable:arch.  Then, after 'adequate' testing, it
> would be moved to stable:arch

~stable as staging/temp area makes sense, more so than yet another level of 
stability. Sounds good.

> In terms of what constitutes 'stable', that will largely be left up to the
> herd and/or package maintainer. Remember, 'stable' refers more to the fact
> that the tree itself does not change, rather than the ebuilds themselves
> being more stable.  (This is another example of something that may change
> down the road once we improve our QA efforts)

On reading the GLEP again I see that it says just this. Looking at other 
messages in this thread, I don't think I was the only one who read into it 
that we need much improved QA efforts before the first stable tree release. I 
agree that a gradual transition is better.

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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