On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 02:45:16AM +0200, Tom Wijsman wrote: > On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:13:03 -0700 > Greg KH <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Great! But as only the latest version released is "stable", that's > > all that should stick around, right? > > Tricky decision to make. Do we really want to force people's kernel > sources to unmerge every single time you push a new version? Which on > its own turn, forces them to build and install the new kernel.
If they are following the vanilla kernels, isn't that what people expect? The latest stable-kernel-of-the-week, as that's what I'm releasing. They don't have to do an update if they don't want to :) > > > If possible we could script it to keep the package unstable the > > > first X days it is in Portage to keep the stabilization effect in > > > place; that way Gentoo users are unaffected if something goes wrong > > > the day after you push a patch, I assume not, but you never know. > > > > If something goes "wrong" the day after I push a update, I push a new > > one fixing the problem, so this shouldn't be an issue, right? > > It's not so much about fixing the problem, but rather about the > severity of the issue. If this involves a corruption that corrupts a > large amount of data on well known hardware which the patches were not > tested on, users with such hardware would be affected; if we however > delay our Gentoo users, they wouldn't become affected due to an > upstream problem, unless they intentionally use the ~ keyword And how would you find out about these types of issues, unless they get tested on those systems? It's a chicken-and-egg issue. People who want more "stable" releases, follow the gentoo kernels. If you want to track upstream directly, use the vanilla kernels, that's what they are there for. > > And as these are coming out about 1-2 a week, the timeout before the > > arch teams could get around to marking things stable seems like a lot > > of work, for something that isn't really needed at all. > > What I meant was to not involve arch teams at all, as per the original > proposal but just have a cron job running somewhere to stabilize the > new versions, as well as to drop older versions. A cron job doesn't mean anything (how to stop it?), so you might as well just always either mark them stable or not, as no one is testing them for "stability". > The delayed stabilization and delayed dropping from the tree are merely > ideas that I think are in favor of the users; I may be wrong about this > but would like to at least see this discussed, unless everyone agrees > we should completely reflect the current state as listed on kernel.org. > > As you probably know, there are different groups of users where some > run personal laptops or desktops whereas other run a (professional) > server. I think an approach that what would make sense for people > running a secure and stable server might not necessarily make sense for > people running their own laptop or desktop. Not all exploits target > both servers and desktops (eg. they can't get behind router). I agree, that's why we have so many different kernel packages. > On the other hand, the vanilla-sources ebuilds set > K_SECURITY_UNSUPPORTED="1"; so perhaps we're not even aiming for the > (professional) server people at all and therefore perhaps only the > laptop and desktop users. Or at least, that's how Gentoo Security and > that variable would make it look like; I agree though that it is > inconsistent with how upstream would look at these versions, I > therofore think it should be a good idea to reevaluate said variable if > we are going to change the way we stabilize and drop vanilla-sources. I'll leave that alone, as I don't know what that flag means or does, sorry. greg k-h
