On 2020-06-12 16:38, Michael wrote:
On Friday, 12 June 2020 15:00:25 BST Jack wrote:
On 6/12/20 9:49 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 4:00 AM n952162 <[email protected]> wrote:
On 2020-06-12 08:40, n952162 wrote:
BTW, is it becoming clear why it is best to update Gentoo at least
ever few months? :)
Well, yes, but it's really pretty onerous. If you have gentoo in
embedded systems, you've got to spend considerable administrative effort
in each one just maintaining the status quo.
I mean, there's no competition to gentoo, of course. But a design goal
could be to have a one-step sync, of some sort.
Maybe one way to work in that direction would be to have regular - say,
yearly - "releases", kind of like other distributions do, but on an
ebuild basis, re-establishing a common base point.
Well, you already can just use a snapshot of the repository from any
date in time, though things like patches might not be mirrored any
longer so that isn't a perfect solution.
Ultimately if there was enough interest in something like this the
solution would probably be another distro that just repackages Gentoo
in a release-based format. Release-based distros have their pros and
cons, but they're definitely a better fit for some problems.
One of the issues with Gentoo is that it is fairly niche and so you
don't have the manpower to support 47 forks. With Debian you have a
bazillion derivatives - half of them are just bundling a different set
of default packages. Ubuntu has a Desktop and Server version of the
distro, and they also have flavors for various desktop environments.
Gentoo basically has just barely enough manpower to support having
Gentoo. We try to accommodate as much choice as possible in how it
gets used which is why this model works as well as it does. However,
we can't support having a Gentoo flavor that is GPL-only, or GPL-free,
or FOSS-only, or no-systemd-in-the-repo, or initial install optimized
for people who read braille. You can actually tailor Gentoo towards
just about any of those directions with some config file tweaks, but
you can't just pick the one of 300 iso images that most closely fit
your needs and run the autoinstaller and forget about it.
What about some sort of tagging? Not bundling or packaging, just
occasional (quarterly?) labels, with a matrix indicating how difficult
it would be to upgrade. A hint to folks who tend to update less often
than they should. A "heads up" that things added or upgraded in the
past quarter are going to be very difficult to do if you are starting
with something more than three/five/...? quarters older than that. Of
course, I suppose if you read the news items as they are released, then
you should have a pretty good idea of which of them are likely to bite
you if you wait too long.
Perhaps I misunderstand this, but isn't it as simple as booting off a LiveCD/
USB, chrooting, changing profiles, cleaning up world file and letting rip with
a full 'emerge -e' @system, followed by @world for good measure?
Is -e a solution to my situation now? How is booting off a live media
better than an obsolete (or broken) one?
And, BTW, is there a reason to do @system if that's a subset of @world?
