Re: [gentoo-server] Stable Portage tree

[Sven Vermeulen]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 08:00:11PM +1000, Phillip Berry wrote:
> Just wondering if there has been any progress on the stable portage tree?
>
> Also, syncing the normal tree removes old versions of ebuilds, obviously this
> is inappropriate for a production environment where for various reasons it is
> sometimes neccessary to stay at an arbitrary version of an application.  The
> loss of the ebuild specific to the legacy version of the application is a
> pain, will the stable tree retain older versions of ebuilds instead of
> removing them?

I think it isn't totally difficult to develop and maintain a stable tree for
an environment. You install Gentoo, let the install go through a few pillars
depending on your environment. Then, monitor Portage upgrades and backport
those to your stable environment.

I have had good luck with this approach for dedicated servers. After all,
when you know what software is available on the server (only a small portion
of all the software available through Portage) upgrades are a lot less
frequent.

Any upgrades that are pending (for instance JRE updates if you are running
J2EE servers) can easily be sorted out. It's still a lot of manual work
though, but I think it isn't easy to concentrate this on the distribution.

After all, one environment always differs from another. Where minor upgrades
are acceptable by a few, others might not like it. 

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

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