Re: [gentoo-user] How can I keep baselayout-1?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:41:38 +0100
Jarry <mr.jarry@×××××.com> wrote:

> On 08-Dec-11 12:26, James Broadhead wrote:
>
> >> I do not want to upgrade to baselayout-2, but I want to
> >> re-emerge system. So how can I do it now, when all 1.x
> >> versions have been removed from portage?
> >
> > I think that the standard answer is "you can't". I mean, you could
> > fetch an old copy of the ebuild from cvs, and add it to a local
> > overlay, but you'd be completely unsupported (unsupportable?).
> >
> > A better question would be - Why do you want to?
>
> This server is ~50 miles away, and if I screw something
> and it does not boot up, I will have to go there and fix it
> on place. One small typo in ~50 config-files which must be
> updated is just enough to cause it...
>
> Anyway I'm surprised that everything older than 2.0.3
> has been simply thrown overboard, especially while it
> worked for us without a problem for many years...

KDE-2 and even KDE-3 also worked just fine for many years. Those are
not in the tree either.

baselayout and openrc changes over the past year were not done on a
whim, it has been leading up to this for about 3 years if not more.

The external apparancy is that the old versions worked and everything
was just fine. But the actual problems with it were many, here's a few:

1. too many things in baselayout had legacy problems attached, files in
odd places, file that were inconsistent with everything else
2. it had a hard dependancy on bash, which is a rather bad thing, it
means you have to have bash installed on anything using Gentoo. What if
your platform did not support bash, or didn't support it well?
3. the init system itself was creaking and groaning a lot and becoming
a maintenance burden

Things do change over time, bits do rot, and periodically legacy shit
needs to be turfed. People resist change for very little good reason
(as you are currently doing) and prefer to only think of their own
little space and not the big picture.

This is what happened with baselayout. All reasonable prior steps that
techies like to have done with migrations were done, there was more
than adequate notice, and all discussions were out in the open. Really,
the presence of baselayout-2 is good and the absence of baselayout-1 is
better.

You haven't been left out in the cold with no way forward. You were
given notice, you chose to not act on it, so the maintenance burden
shifts to you. This is the general contract between gentoos devs and
users. Portage gives you all the tools you need to maintain your
systems at current levels, so you CAN keep it as-is until your next
maintenence windows on that server 50 miles away when you intend being
in the room.

Some recent decisions in gentoo-land about what to deprecate and when
have indeed been questionable, but in all honesty baselayout is not one
of them.


-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com