Gentoo Archives: gentoo-kernel

From: Tom Wijsman <TomWij@g.o>
To: gentoo-kernel@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-kernel] vanilla-kernel sources should not be marked stable for obsolete versions
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 00:48:03
Message-Id: 20130622024516.3a51911e@TOMWIJ-GENTOO
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-kernel] vanilla-kernel sources should not be marked stable for obsolete versions by Greg KH
1 On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:13:03 -0700
2 Greg KH <gregkh@g.o> wrote:
3
4 > Great! But as only the latest version released is "stable", that's
5 > all that should stick around, right?
6
7 Tricky decision to make. Do we really want to force people's kernel
8 sources to unmerge every single time you push a new version? Which on
9 its own turn, forces them to build and install the new kernel.
10
11 > > If possible we could script it to keep the package unstable the
12 > > first X days it is in Portage to keep the stabilization effect in
13 > > place; that way Gentoo users are unaffected if something goes wrong
14 > > the day after you push a patch, I assume not, but you never know.
15 >
16 > If something goes "wrong" the day after I push a update, I push a new
17 > one fixing the problem, so this shouldn't be an issue, right?
18
19 It's not so much about fixing the problem, but rather about the
20 severity of the issue. If this involves a corruption that corrupts a
21 large amount of data on well known hardware which the patches were not
22 tested on, users with such hardware would be affected; if we however
23 delay our Gentoo users, they wouldn't become affected due to an
24 upstream problem, unless they intentionally use the ~ keyword
25
26 > And as these are coming out about 1-2 a week, the timeout before the
27 > arch teams could get around to marking things stable seems like a lot
28 > of work, for something that isn't really needed at all.
29
30 What I meant was to not involve arch teams at all, as per the original
31 proposal but just have a cron job running somewhere to stabilize the
32 new versions, as well as to drop older versions.
33
34 The delayed stabilization and delayed dropping from the tree are merely
35 ideas that I think are in favor of the users; I may be wrong about this
36 but would like to at least see this discussed, unless everyone agrees
37 we should completely reflect the current state as listed on kernel.org.
38
39 As you probably know, there are different groups of users where some
40 run personal laptops or desktops whereas other run a (professional)
41 server. I think an approach that what would make sense for people
42 running a secure and stable server might not necessarily make sense for
43 people running their own laptop or desktop. Not all exploits target
44 both servers and desktops (eg. they can't get behind router).
45
46 On the other hand, the vanilla-sources ebuilds set
47 K_SECURITY_UNSUPPORTED="1"; so perhaps we're not even aiming for the
48 (professional) server people at all and therefore perhaps only the
49 laptop and desktop users. Or at least, that's how Gentoo Security and
50 that variable would make it look like; I agree though that it is
51 inconsistent with how upstream would look at these versions, I
52 therofore think it should be a good idea to reevaluate said variable if
53 we are going to change the way we stabilize and drop vanilla-sources.
54
55 --
56 With kind regards,
57
58 Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
59 Gentoo Developer
60
61 E-mail address : TomWij@g.o
62 GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D
63 GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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