[gentoo-server] Stable portage tree (again)

[José González Gómez]

Hi there,

From time to time a thread regarding this ad GLEP 19 shows in the list. I've been thinking about the problem, and would like to share my thoughts, and hear other's people comments:

First of all, instability of the portage tree may be caused, or better, perceived for two reasons: addition of new ebuilds (maybe under tested) and deletion of old ebuilds (not longer supported by the Gentoo team).

About the first point, addition of new ebuilds, some people perceive the addition per se as a source of instability, but I think this comes from the "emerge -uDN world" kind of sys admining. As long as you stick with a stable set of versions for your packages, and use glsa-check for doing secutiry upgrades, you would have a slowly changing system you can have under control. Then once a year or two you may go the emerge world way, and have a system totally upgraded with the latest available versions. Or even better, you may gradually update your applications to control the upgrade pace. In addition, what's stable for a given admin or installation may be completely broken for some other admin or installation, so I don't see a real benefit of having a ultra-stable branch of ebuilds, also taking into account that those ebuilds should be tested with all the available use flags combination to really be sure they're really stable. I think we can't ask the Gentoo devs for this, it's insane. I think a better approach for this would be to have a kind of wiki web hosted at whatever.gentoo.org, where admins would report their success/failure using a given version of a package with a given set of use flags. Then you could take your own informed decission before ever trying to upgrade to a new version in your test environment (you have one, don't you?)

About the deletion of ebuilds, this is another kind of beast, that can cause problems while upgrading, revdep-rebuilding, reverting to older versions in case of problematic upgrades... I guess the reason to delete an ebuild is that the Gentoo devs no longer support them and this is the explicit way of telling it. So let's imagine I still want to use that ebuild knowing I'll be on my own, what options do I have? Maybe getting an old snapshot, checking out an old revision from the Gentoo cvs (is this publicly available?) or hand mantaining my own portage tree.

I would like to make a proposal here. What if no longer mantained ebuilds were marked but not deleted? Let's say you have _x86 in KEYWORDS for ebuilds/packages no longer mantained, that emerge is aware of that and can inform us of this and that those ebuilds are mantained in the portage tree for, let's say, a year WITH NO SECURITY BACKPORTS on them. This would be kind of a end of life notice that gives you some time to react. This way you still would be able to use the ebuild at your own risk, and this wouldn't represent much extra work load for the Gentoo devs, as the deletion process could be automatic with the use of some scripts. What do you think?

Best regards
Jose