Mike Myers wrote:
(snippage)
I'm not trying to suggest that Gentoo should go to a binary distro or
anything like that. I'm just wondering why there
isn't some kind of update management system to like, differentiate minor
updates like firefox 1.5.0.5 <http://1.5.0.5> to firefox 1.5.0.7
<http://1.5.0.7> and major ones like, y'know, gcc 3.4.4 to 4+?
Ok - sorry, was misled by the mentioning of packages!
The update system is the -only- nice thing about it over Gentoo. Debian
is nowhere near Gentoo when it comes to everything else (especially
docs). I don't think suggesting a single feature that another distro
has and putting into Gentoo is trying to make it a clone. I'm just
asking for a relief from having to constantly worry if updating
something out of the 300 packages that need updated is going to break
something, and not having to make sure etc-update isn't going to destroy
my custom configs afterwards. If it wasn't for that, Gentoo would be
perfect. I'm sure there's got to be others that would agree.
Yeah, it would be good to know an update is not going to give a broken
system - but to implement some sort of (extra) tagged release testing
would be a significant amount of effort for the community. In addition
it could be argued that there is potentially little real gain in doing
this, as it is *never* possible to ensure no breakage (e.g. Microsoft
updates are a case in point...).
At the end of the day, regardless of whatever release
engineering/quality process Gentoo (or any software product) has, you
really have to follow the steps:
1/ Update (1 or more) machines in your test environment.
2/ Run your test suite.
3/ Update the rest of your machines if 2/ pases.
Personally I don't see why this does not scale.
Cheers
Mark
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