Yes, the main goal for this GLEP is to get a stable tree that isn't a moving
target constantly. We're hoping that it'll make it better for us to do QA down
the road, but first we need to have something thats at least somewhat stable.
I would argue that it's not really possible for anyone, Debian, Red Hat or IBM, to do QA because this is dependent on the deployment environment. Package quality is dependent on the original authors, so all that a distro can do is prove all the versions and some patches - with the ability to mix'n'match.
Version 1.1 of something might not work with version 2.4 of something else, but 1.2 is buggy against 2.5 of something else. Hence why I'm constantly having to switch stuff around despite being fully QA'd releases from even commercial vendors - eg, I'm having to recompile the NFS server for Apple gear.
I'm trying to make sure any tools we use to create our snapshot will be
available to our users so they can do this own their own if they would like!
This sounds good, though it's almost there as it is... the way that portage calculates what version to emerge in just needs to be frozen despite later updates. So capturing the information of "which packages are stable now, keep using those as the stable version (except for security updates)" would accomplish this.
To be more specific... portage calculates what packages are stable from the x86, ~x86, ppc, ~ppc (etc etc) keywords in the ebuilds, so doing an "emerge sync" will change that. Therein lies the problem, since which versions to use should be snapshotted and later stable packages shouldn't be automatically chosen.
If all the packages were examined for what keywords they have at that point, then that information was frozen, then I would be able to "emerge sync" and still perform further emerges with the same software versions as if I hadn't emerge synced... while preserving the ability to update portage, comprehend new ebuild formats and chose where to override.
Currently, "stable" = "latest version", which can be changed to "stable = version in snapshot", where "snapshot = stable latest versions at that point in time, or if no snapshot entry, fall back to actual latest stable version".
I really don't think I'm explaining this well, so let me know if you want me to try explaining again! :)
If you have a better suggestion please tell us! We've gone through multiple
scenarios of different ways of making this work.
I'll pop into IRC soon and see if you're around for further discussion. Any others interested in this topic welcome too! :)
My nickname is "spoob", so say hi if you see me.
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