On Tue, Nov 21, 2006, Doug Summers wrote: > IMHO the STABLE & CURRENT branches are becoming way too close to being > the same thing. In the past the openpkg srpms would have never been > upgraded in the stable branch as fast as they are now. Here are a couple > of examples: > > tar 1.16 was released on 10/21; on 10/22 (one day later) both > openpkg-stable & tar-stable are upgraded which is killing my AIX builds. > > binutils 2.17 had one user complain about not building (works fine for > me BTW). Now (again one day later) binutils-stable is upgraded.
Well, in the week of the branch-times (which was 2006-10-16 to 2006-10-23) the 2-STABLE-20061018 and E1.0-SOLID series obviously received really lots of changes. Your particular example of GNU tar 1.16 was certainly a worst case as it exactly was falling into this fast moving week. But in the case of GNU tar 1.16 you will see that we've only merged it to 2-STABLE but intentionally not updated the 2-STABLE-20061018 production series with it (which still contains GNU tar 1.15.1 as of today!) in order to not destablize this fully "stable" production series. If you look at our comparison chart under http://www.openpkg.org/product/series/comparison.php you will even see that 2-STABLE is intentionally marked as just "potentially stable" and also mainly intended for just "testing" purposes. For production environments the reproducable and more quality assured 2-STABLE SNAPSHOT is provided. So, at least production environments were not be affected by those problems like the fast update to GNU tar 1.16 in 2-STABLE. As long as the build farm of the OpenPKG Foundation e.V. shows no problems or the upstream software contains enough important bug or even security fixes, our general rule is to merge the software to 2-STABLE as soon as possible to get tested as early as possible. Only the really risky and incompatible changes (as it was e.g. the introduction of the SetUID functionality in August 2006 or the shebang-line changes of run-command scripts in September 2006) is first settled in CURRENT for a longer time before it is merged to 2-STABLE. In your particular example, as far as I can still remember GNU tar 1.16 showed no build problems already on 2006-10-22 on our build-farm (which unfortunately does _NOT_ contain any AIX boxes until now!) and hence it was immediately taken over into 2-STABLE and E1.0-SOLID as it both contained lots of other important bug fixes and finally merged in a bunch of existing security fixes (which this way reduces our required patching). If you look today, GNU tar is -- according to the feedback of all platforms we have available in our build-farm -- just fine everywhere: http://bf.openpkg.net/openpkg-cgi/openpkg-tools/bf-ui.cgi?page=status&submit=status&vs_package=tar-1.16-20061022 I know very well that it is extremely nasty for you that your AIX builds got broken because of this particular update package, but until we have an AIX box available to us in our build farm we really will never be able to detect those problems ourself. Sorry, but for those unavailable platforms we can just blindly take over fixes which get reported by our community users from time to time. > I thought these upgrades/fixes were what the CURRENT branch was all > about. I've made many posts about packages needing AIX-specific changes > that used to be placed in CURRENT for a long time before the STABLE > release was changed. CURRENT is about absolute bleeding edge development and an ultra fast moving target, including making fully incompatible changes which break really everything for everyone at any time. 2-STABLE is a still moving target and about stabilization and testing, but it is still acceptable if a few packages break on particular platforms. 2-STABLE-YYYYMMDD snapshots are slowly moving targets and are about full stabilization and production where we _try_ to make sure that all packages do no longer break on any platform (which is available to us in the build farm). E1.0-SOLID is a mostly freezed target and is a about rock solid and quality assurred packages which are not allowed to break on any of the officially supported platforms. > Please reconsider how fast the STABLE rpm's are upgraded. It's getting > next-to-impossible to keep up. Between 2-STABLE SNAPSHOTS the 2-STABLE branch usually is just selectively updated and hence should not be broken as a whole easily. But every 4 months (as it was the case between 2006-10-16 and 2006-10-23) the mass-merges from CURRENT certainly destabilize 2-STABLE temporarily -- but OTOH because of the subsequent snapshot engineering for 2-STABLE-YYYYMMDD, it is usually rather quickly stabilized again. Nevertheless, I absolutely see your point and I really would like to see AIX becoming an officially supported platform for OpenPKG so we can better ensure that no packages are broken under it. In the meantime I can only recommend that for production use you are sticking to the low moving targets E1.0-SOLID and 2-STABLE-20061018 and in parallel build especially the fast moving target CURRENT as often as possible to help us to detect problems as early as possible. Ralf S. Engelschall [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.engelschall.com ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
