SUGGESTION: Portage 6 month "freeze" option

BlackEdder · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 7:34 pm Post subject:

I think you can just upgrade it to the next release, as far as I know it;s the same as with debian and you don't have to reinstall that to keep it up2date...

Not sure though

Their website will probably help you out

Flammie · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 7:47 pm Post subject:

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Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:15 am Post subject:

Lokheed · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:16 am Post subject:

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:18 am Post subject:

Earthwings · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:23 am Post subject:

Calm down people, please.

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Headrush · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 4:13 am Post subject:

I don't know how much work it would be to implement, but why not just adapt portage.

Have a flag in /etc/make.conf that designates that you are using the "STABLE" release schedule.

When emerge sync is performed, if the flag is set, download and replace package.keywords, package.unmask, etc and place them in the correct locations.

When you perform emerge -u world you only get the packages designated by whoever administers this feature.

All someone has to do is maintain those file lists.

Ideas?

I am happy with the current method, but I understand your position for mom and pop :-)

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:05 am Post subject:

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:16 am Post subject:

Headrush · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:34 am Post subject:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:48 pm Post subject:

BlackEdder · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 1:33 pm Post subject:

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 2:16 pm Post subject:

richk449 · Guru Joined: 24 Oct 2003 Posts: 345

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 3:00 pm Post subject:

BlackEdder · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 3:47 pm Post subject:

WHat I see as we are after is something like the debian system. Their stable branch evolves very slowly, but important bigfixes/security related fixes are all backported. I've managed a couple of debian servers and the amount of micromanagement required is very very limited. Now ofcourse you can say then go debian, but I know a couple of ppl who are torn between debian and gentoo, gentoo offers them the freedom they crave, but debian makes sure that if you can't be bothered to micromanage today you can still bring the system up2date. These ppl would surely stick to gentoo if a frozen branch was introduced.

Conclusion: I am all for glep 19

and would immediately implement it on the servers I have.

acasto · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 10:23 pm Post subject:

This is the first I have heard of this glep19 and it sounds great. I love the current portage the way it is now from things like my personal workstation and laptop. But for my servers at work, it seems I'm always having to devote large chunks of time to reading reports and changelogs, many of which dosn't apply to my system. Even though you should reading the changelogs, it can take quite a bit of time to sort down to the ones you absolutely need to read.

As for the ones saying the current way is fine, it is, but requires a level of personal devotion to which many can not apply in a corporate environment. You get to know and treat your own system like a child, and like a child you know every single "update" (ie: vacination, feeding, changing, etc...) and modification you made to it (well, maybe not modify the child). However in a coporate environment you face two problems from this. One, any more than a few systems and it's easy to forget and lose-your place among the many customizations you must make to maintain the system. And two, where we understand the importance of spending time micro-managing portage updates, the executives may not. We must remember that in the corporate world, time equals money. And an executive, who is used to windows updates, will probably not be able to understand and/or justify devoting so much time to such a task.

To those who think this is just laziness, I and others here say this because many of us have to put up with it. My servers run an emerge -uDvp world nightly and email the results. It only takes a week for those results to get to be a pretty big list, but once running a glsa-check, only maybe one or two apply. So then I have to take the results of the glsa-check and run it back through emerge (becuase I don't trust the 'experimental' software yet to make changes) to see exactly what I would need to change. Then I can run these through etcat -c to see the changes. But then dosen't etcat -c only show changes from the latest version to the one right behind? So if you have more than a version over in a update, you would have to pull the version numbers of every one inbetween and run them.

For now I just write many scripts with awks and greps and such to process all of this for me and just email the reports and changelogs, which works, but isn't ideal.

- Adam
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QV · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 54