Re: [gentoo-dev] Questions on overlays, repositories and PMS

2018-02-24 Thread Roy Bamford
On 2018.02.24 01:32, Michael Lienhardt wrote:
> 
> 
> Il 23/02/2018 20:37, Alec Warner ha scritto:
> > My general observation is that Gentoo is not successful as an
> organization about deprecating and removing things. One area where
> Gentoo has done well is in EAPI and in PMS itself, with mostly-clear
> versioning and standards and whatnot. But in general if something
> worked 15 years ago, it probably still works today (doubly so for
> sys-apps/portage).
> > 
> > There is a different question when building a tool like yours if it
> is worth the effort to support things that are 15 years old and are
> possibly not used (particularly in cases where functionality was
> replaced). I'd recommend starting with the basic implementation and
> adding support for the 'older' formats when users ask for them; but
> this is mostly a trade-off in efforts. If your goal is to build 
> > a "100% compatible" tool then you will probably need to support
> these edge cases.
> 
> You have a very good point.
> I'd like to be complete (it's a side effect of working in formal
> methods), but it's quite unrealistic as I am the only developer in
> this project, and it's true that there are few technical design
> choices that were made in portage that I'd be happier not to
> implement.
> I'd like to implement the /etc/portage/repos.conf system to remove as
> many hard coded references to /usr/portage in my code as possible.
> Moreover, the /etc/portage/repos.conf system looks nice, modular with
> explicit dependencies and it almost unifies all the repositories (I
> don't really understand the need of a DEFAULT section).
> 
> If possible, I'd rather avoid implementing things that are deprecated,
> but like you pointed out, few are (portage seems to be always
> expanding with new/alternative functionalities).
> The ones that are, like the /etc/portage/package.keywords file, seem
> to be still used (I've got a request to support it in my
> get_installation.sh script).
> Additionally, there are two systems that I did not want to implement
> but had to: the IUSE_IMPLICIT and USE_EXPAND.
> I didn't find any good documentation on these systems (nor the PMS nor
> https://dev.gentoo.org/%7Ezmedico/portage/doc/man/portage.5.html are
> very clear on the subject -- the PMS is still clearer), I tested a lot
> and looked at the portage implementation...
> I don't understand the reason to implement these systems with bash
> variables expanded with prefixes, while many of the USE flag
> manipulation is done with dedicated files (use.*, package.use.*).
> It really felt like an old design choice kept there because it worked,
> but which could be simplified.
> 
> On a similar topic, does anyone still have USE-related variables in
> his /etc/env.d folder? (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/USE_ORDER)
> It seems to me that portage's current effort is to have all
> configuration files in /etc/portage or in the profile.
> 
> Best,
> Michael Lienhardt
> 
> 
> 
Michael,

'Support' can be as simple as nagging the user to move with the 
times and failing. 

I suspect that many older systems (including mine) are not updated
because it still works.

crossdev users may be familiar with this approach. 

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
elections
gentoo-ops
forum-mods


pgp8okkf_VHbW.pgp
Description: PGP signature


[gentoo-dev] glibc 2.16/19 for Gentoo Prefix on antique kernels

2018-02-24 Thread Benda Xu
Hi all,

Yes, it's 2018.  But there are still RHEL 4 and 5 systems running
antique kernels such as 2.6.8 and 2.6.18.  In my experience, many of
them are data acquisition hubs or computing clusters.  No administrator
cares about security as long as they "work".

Under the form "Prefix", Gentoo is set out to rescue users trapped in
these abandoned wastelands of antiques.  After years of work, we have
achieved that goal, except one minor thing: glibc periodically drop
support for old linux kernels, the lastest glibc supporting linux 2.6.8
is 2.16 and for linux-2.6.18 it is glibc-2.19.

With the recent reunion of the Toolchain Project, old glibc versions are
masked and removed, accelerating the adoption of new versions.  This
opens a new oppotunity for the Prefix: people stops caring about
unsupported glibc versions, the Prefix Project can take them over
without worrying about breaking other peoples' machines.

Now, profiles/default/linux/amd64/17.0/no-multilib/prefix/kernel-2.6.16+
unmasks https://bugs.python.org/issue28092
2. https://bugs.python.org/issue31255
3. https://bugs.python.org/issue29157
4. 
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/7eb61502d827476a9326b0f180dbd2fa
5. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Toolchain/Patchsets_with_Git
6. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Toolchain/Support_policies