Re: [gentoo-user] a question about updating process

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 6:52 AM, behrouz khosravi <bz.khosravi@×××××.com> wrote:
> well chromium was just an example. I just think that when there is a version
> upgrade, a patch should be enough.

For things like backports you're fairly likely to only get a patch.
However, for an upstream version change (which chromium seems to have
every other week) you're probably going to get a full tarball.

> I have read that portage is migrating to git, but I guess I got it wrong,
> because I thought that the source codes will be maintained using git too.
> However why not? why not use git for source maintenance too?

Portage probably will migrate to git at some point, but when it does
you'll probably not notice a thing.

Gentoo doesn't maintain the source to chromium - upstream does.  In
some cases Gentoo doesn't even redistribute the source (licensing
issues).  For chromium Google publishes a tarball on googleapis.com
and Gentoo mirrors it.

There has been talk about creating some kind of source repository for
things like patches/etc, but that isn't going to really change when we
distribute patches vs upstream tarballs.  Generally speaking upstream
tarballs are preferred over patches to keep things simple.  With what
we do now you know you're basically getting chromium as upstream
distributes it.  If we were to just mirror chrome-25 and 300 binary
diffs to patch it up to the current version nobody could keep track of
it all, and while you'd save some space on each upgrade your first
install might involve downloading 10GB of diffs unless we went even
further and had a variety of full vs incremental files.  This has been
discussed in terms of having portage on squashfs and just doing it for
our own stuff looks to be fairly painful, let alone doing it for every
upstream out there.

Rich