Stuart Herbert wrote:
On 11/28/06, Chris Gianelloni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As I have said, I've mentioned several times the idea of doing a
"release tree" to go along with each release.
The release tree is not the basis for this.
a) Releases (and the releng work that goes into it) are exclusively
desktop-oriented.
You make it sound like releng doesn't care at all about non-desktop packages.
The reason for the "exclusivity" is that the media that's typically built for
release (GRP, LiveCD) is targetted for the largest audience...desktop users. If
someone wants to volunteer to create a set of server-related GRP and a server
LiveCD (as silly as this is for most things), they wouldn't be blocked outright.
b) Release trees have a nasty habit of picking up last minute changes
(such as gcc 4.1) to suit the release, not stability.
Gcc 4.1.1 wasn't a last minute change. The release snapshots are originally
created a month or more before the actual release. As stuff is stabilized in the
tree, it's stabilized in the release snapshot as well. During the release cycle,
we planned for gcc-4.1.1 to be stable by release (at least for x86, amd64, and a
few other arches). We had it stable in the release snapshot a few weeks before
the tree did and were testing the crap out of it.
No version changes on any packages, except those which are necessary due
to a security violation, or a vulnerable package's dependencies.
Tying a minimal-b0rkage tree to the arbitrary schedule of our releases
does not serve all of our users. We are back to the same arguments we
had when I said that the Seeds project would have to have its own
independent release schedules :(
The "release tree" isn't really for minimal breakage. The *real* intent (at
least from my POV) is to have a non-moving target for vendors to certify their
software against (wouldn't it be nice for Oracle to be actually supported on
Gentoo 2007.0 or something like that?), and so admins don't have to do the
"upgrade dance" once a week or even every day (like I do).
Thereś little merit in us creating mostly stagnant trees. Other Linux
distros are already very good at doing that - far better than we will
be at it - because they have advantages such as a paid workforce and
more upstream developers on their books.
The "non-stagnant" nature of Gentoo isn't the only reason that people use
Gentoo. People use Gentoo for the configurability and customizability. As
someone who admins more than a handful of Gentoo servers, I would absolutely
*love* the combo of Gentoo's flexibility and a non-moving tree to make upgrades
easier to deal with.
--
Andrew Gaffney http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer Installer Project
Today's lesson in political correctness: "Go asphyxiate on a phallus"
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