Hi!
On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 10:21:14AM +0200, Jos? Gonz?lez G?mez wrote:
> for, let's say, a year WITH NO SECURITY BACKPORTS on them. This would be
Impossible. There many means for 'stable'. For me, stable mean no
security holes and no critical bugs as absolute requirements and all other
things discussed under this topic in last year as less important requirements.
For now I see only two alternatives for 'no security holes & no critical bugs'
distribution:
1) Use something like stable Debian/whatever distribution, which was
released some time ago, and has old enough software with good support:
updates with (backported) security fixes and critical bug fixes
(or workarounds). Weakness of this way is having sometimes too old
software, which is unacceptable because your customers will need
features of newer software and you'll have to install & support it
manually.
2) Believe in Gentoo ARCH=x86 _IS_ 'stable' in all means and spend a little
more time for compiliing/updating/testing. As bonus you'll have fairly
up-to-date system with more features and your customers will love it. :)
I vote for regular updates just because it's much more simpler to detect
broken software and rollback to previous version when you update 1-3
packages at once, than when you update overall system once per year.
If you think possibility of your application failure because of upgrading
Gentoo is something which much never happens, even with fairly small
possibility, then you just thinking wrong way. There always possibility for
such failure because of bug in your application or hardware failure which
you can't prevent! Of course we must do everything we can to minimize
possibility of such application failure, including software update reason...
But I think using Gentoo x86 and regular updates is good enough way to
reach this goal. Statistics say SOME ppl have troubles in this setup in
average once per year. I think it's good enough, and I hope Gentoo devs
working on improving this statistics. :) And I'm sure same troubles happens
even with stable Debian/whatever distribution from time to time.
And will happens with 'stable portage tree' if it will born at some time!
***
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I think 'stable portage tree' topic isn't
really about needs for MORE STABLE portage tree. I think it's about ppl
who doesn't like regular updates, who update system only every 3+ months
and who have troubles with such updates: too many packages changes at once,
can't rollback to previous versions because they was deleted from portage, etc.
For me - this is just because of portage nature: while it's possible to
update when you want, doing this seldom make every update much harder and
result in less stable system and feeling you've less control over system.
I think this just should be documented as weakness (or just nature) of
portage system: seldom (or no) updates result in less stable system!
--
WBR, Alex.
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