Re: [gentoo-dev] You currently cannot smoothly upgrade a 4 months old Gentoo system

[John Helmert III]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2021 at 05:34:16PM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 03 Nov 2021, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Nov 3, 2021 at 11:03 AM Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@g.o> wrote:
> >>
> >> This is not about finding solution to upgrade the system (in this case
> >> it was enough to force PYTHON_TARGETS=python3_8 for portage). This is
> >> about raising awareness that Gentoo is a rolling distribution and that
> >> we guarantee users to be able to upgrade their system when they do world
> >> upgrades just once a year (remember: in my case the last world upgrade
> >> is just 4 months old!). If they cannot upgrade their system without
> >> manual intervention, we failed to do our job.
>
> > Do we have this "guarantee" documented somewhere?  I thought I've
> > heard six months tossed around.  You say one year.  It seems
> > reasonable to have some sort of guideline like this and try to stick
> > with it, at least for @system.
>
> We do. Summary of 2009-11-09 Council meeting:
>
> | https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20091109-summary.txt
> |
> | Upgrade path for old systems
> | ----------------------------
> | Vote (unanimous): The ebuild tree must provide an upgrade path to a
> | stable system that hasn't been updated for one year.

Does "upgrade path" imply a simple world upgrade is all that should be
necessary to upgrade the system? I wouldn't interpret it this way.

> | Action: leio will start a discussion on gentoo-dev on if and how to
> | support upgrading systems that are outdated more than a year.