Re: [gentoo-user] Re: anti-portage wreckage?

[Mark Kirkwood]

Mike Myers wrote:

> (snippage)
> I'm not trying to suggest that Gentoo should go to a binary distro or
> anything like that.   I'm just wondering why there
> isn't some kind of update management system to like, differentiate minor
> updates like firefox 1.5.0.5 <http://1.5.0.5> to firefox 1.5.0.7
> <http://1.5.0.7> and major ones like, y'know, gcc 3.4.4 to 4+?

Ok - sorry, was misled by the mentioning of packages!


>
> The update system is the -only- nice thing about it over Gentoo.  Debian
> is nowhere near Gentoo when it comes to everything else (especially
> docs).  I don't think suggesting a single feature that another distro
> has and putting into Gentoo is trying to make it a clone.  I'm just
> asking for a relief from having to constantly worry if updating
> something out of the 300 packages that need updated is going to break
> something, and not having to make sure etc-update isn't going to destroy
> my custom configs afterwards.  If it wasn't for that, Gentoo would be
> perfect.  I'm sure there's got to be others that would agree.


Yeah, it would be good to know an update is not going to give a broken 
system - but to implement some sort of (extra) tagged release testing 
would be a significant amount of effort for the community. In addition 
it could be argued that there is potentially little real gain in doing 
this, as it is *never* possible to ensure no breakage (e.g. Microsoft 
updates are a case in point...).

At the end of the day, regardless of whatever release 
engineering/quality process Gentoo (or any software product) has, you 
really have to follow the steps:

1/ Update (1 or more) machines in your test environment.
2/ Run your test suite.
3/ Update the rest of your machines if 2/ pases.

Personally I don't see why this does not scale.


Cheers

Mark
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