Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 19, reloaded (again)

[Olivier Crete]

On Mon, 2004-08-09 at 16:12 -0500, Corey Shields wrote:
> On Monday 09 August 2004 03:56 pm, Olivier Crete wrote:
> > I'm re-proposing the tarball approach. When a stable release is made, a
> > tarball of the tree would be taken (while removing all of the non-stable
> > stuff and just keeping the arch keyworks if necessary..).. And then an
> > overlay rsync for security updates would be created.. This ensures the
> > long term survival of the release.. It also allows us to keep
> > "distributing" very old release (we know how many shops still use
> > redhat7 or even 6) without putting too much strain on the mirrors.
>
> This isn't a realistic solution.  I think that moving away from the Portage
> tree as it is designed would be setting ourselves up to have a product with
> an end of life.  With an evolving tree, some things may not change for a
> year, but when they DO change, an update should be possible without breaking
> the system or needing to start from scratch.  The idea is not to freeze the
> tree permanently, but make it more "stable".

The whole point of a stable tree is to be stable.... rsync just doesn't
offer the same kind of guarantee.. Having security updates separate from
the "released" distribution is also a must imho. And this approach would
make that easy... This does not stop us from adding updates to the
overlay, it just makes it much easier for admins to control which
updates they want and which ones they dont...


> > Why do we need something as complex as profiling? And something that
> > requires work from every maintainer
>
> Profiling makes it such that we won't need work from every maintainer.

The idea of profiles (if I understand it correctly) is that every
package that is part of stable must be added to a file (thousands of
them).. And then every maintainer must make sure that he does not delete
the stable package for every arch in every version. We already see
people deleting the stable versions for less used arches... And if
stable uses a separate tree, then there is really no point to profiles..

> > Rsync is expensive for servers.. lets keep it down to the minimum. Its
> > much easier to get ftp/http mirrors than rsync...
>
> This is not true.  We have MANY more rsync mirrors than we have source
> mirrors.  The problem here is that most people don't have the disk space
> required for a distfiles mirror, whereas an rsync (portage) mirror is easy.
> I envision "enterprise" systems as needing to sync the tree less, especially
> if there are fewer updates expected.  The rsync issue really isn't an issue
> (and I'm not a fan of rsync by any means).

We may have more rsync mirrors than source mirrors, but I'm sure that if
we offered the options of having stable mirrors without distfiles (just
the CD and portage tarballs), we'd have tons of those. (The new policy
of not having cds for p2,p3,p4,p68 really does help too imho)..  

-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@g.o
Gentoo Developer


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