Re: Void-Stable?

[Christian Neukirchen <chneuk...@gmail.com>]

bougyman <boug...@rubyists.com> writes:

>   With the existence of the void daily package archive, I've been bouncing 
> around an idea about how someone (some admin/architect/enterprise) could 
> maintain
> their own 'stable' release cycle of void. If upon initial configuration the 
> repos are set to an archive with a date stamp, and the user has a way to 
> validate that moving
> from that datestamp to ### future datestamp doesn't (potentially) break any 
> functionality, they can safely choose an upgrade path. for instance.
>
> I install on 2015-03-26 and lock the repository to the archive snapshot of 
> that date
>
> on 2015-04-26 I run *magic-command* and ask if upgrading to current 
> (2015-04-26) would (potentially) break any installed packages.
>
> I get output about any important breaking changes (to xbps, etc) which may 
> require an 'upgrade this first' action or 'remove these' actions.
> I get output that may just say: 'Upgrade to 2015-04-01 first, then to 
> 2015-04-15, then 2015-04-26' (or does this automagically?)
>
> Thoughts?

So, I think rolling release ala Void works because everyone uses the
same versions of software, and bugs are found and fixed quickly due to
that.

A stable release will perhaps be used by 10% of the users (and mostly
not the devs IME; this can be seen in Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD), thus
this quick turnaround time will drastically slow down. -> stable is
possibly more buggy than current, and takes longer to fix, and in
general is considered to be a burden.

I think having a stable void would be a good thing to have, but I
don't see right now how we can do it given our limited peoplepower.

One idea I once had, for a different distro, was to split the packages
into two categories: A core system (kernel, compiler, essential libs
ala png, zlib, libressl, essential utils, essential daemons), and
applications (X11, GNOME, ...).  The core system would be maintained
in a very stable way (i.e. no major version bumps, bug+sec fixes only),
while the application part would be rolling release (newest Firefox etc.).
And every 6 months, the core system would be updated (probably
resulting in a full system recompile...)

(These major rebuilds probably would be quite messy, but upstream
support for a 6 month old release should be possible.)

I think we are still moving too fast for a proper stable environment.

Just my 2ct,
-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneuk...@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org