Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

Am Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:41:22 -0800
schrieb Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>: 

> All current integration requests for stable-rc and stable are taken  
> care of (other than 3 tricky ones for stable). The main problem now is  
> getting bugs fixed and the integration requests filed. I've done my  
> best to stay on top of approving/commenting on integration requests.
> 
> git integrations are fairly easy and I even enjoy doing them (most of  
> the time ;)).

That is an area where I feel kinda blind... being always tight on time, I 
tend to fix stuff so  that my box compiles stuff and I have working software 
and am already fighting to get these properly into git -> test grimoire.
How preemtive are you on looking for stuff to integrate?
Is it only bugzilla requests  (that would mean that only a tiny part of my 
work goes the way to stable... wouldn't it be for stable-rc being freshly 
branched off test some time ago)?
Is a good part of integration also done by devs who fix stuff and integrate 
it themselves?

For me it is already straining my time resources (and nerves) to make commits 
with valid comments and also edit HISTORY file manually, which gives me a 
redundancy feel. Then having to open a new bug for every small fix and 
requesting integration (open webbrowser, logging into bugzilla)... plus 
waiting for that integration to happen for the boxen that actually use stable 
grimoire (none for me:-( ) - that looks like a long way around a small 
problem (supposed the fix was about changing one line in BUILD or so).

I guess it could be shorter if devs generally integrated stuff themselves (do 
they? I am really not aware of the real situation), but I know that that 
wouldn't be fun for me ... I guess I'll never be friend with git -- Even 
cogito plays tricks on me:-(

Well, fun or not, having at least two grimoires and careful integrations 
happening between them is a minimum of stability to ask for IMHO.
But what about the number of these grimoires, actually? I'd like to raise 
again the request to consider dropping the stable-rc grimoire.
We are less than 50 ppl working on our 5500-spell distro. We need a way for 
this small number of ppl to manage as many spells as possible and have a 
certain level of stability in our main grimoire.
Reducing spell number is a bad idea, IMHO, since availability of software is 
a _strong_ point in choosing a distro. Hm, I am tempted to say that it is 
_the_ point;-)

We also have the special problem that we rely on external upstream sources 
(tarballs), that cause any "stable" grimoire to become unstable with time 
(changing tarballs without version change, deleting old versions form web 
site).
We cannot allow the stable grimoire to grow old like Debian does. It's a main 
issue unless we settle for enhancing our mirrors and ensure having always 
every source for stable grimoire at hand and also modify the summon stage to 
fall back to our mirrors also on checksum failure -- or add an option to use 
the smgl server as safe source to begin with.
But part of our philosophy is that we don't actually distribute the stuff; 
that we provide scripts for users to get stuff from upstream. For that we 
have to closely track upstream and have a high pressure to stay up to date.

Having one stable grimoire that gets safe version upgrades and bug fixes 
integrated asap and one test grimoire for experiments and bigger upgrades 
like getting glibc-2.4 / gcc-4.1 to work looks like the obvious solution to 
me.

We will always have personal grimoires / git branches for special stuff like 
xorg-modular.
And if someone wants a really tested, stable software environment that he 
trusts on, he can make a private grimoire (of limited number of interesting 
spells) with his set of preferred spell versions and download all needed 
sources and have them handy for any installation on a later day where 
upstream may have changed.
This someone even could take his prepared ultra-stable-server-core-system and 
make an ISO of sorcery+spells+sources ...

Well, to conclude, I really would like to see a future where we can actually 
tell a new user to start off a recent stable ISO / grimoire and have fun with 
that. But many new ppl. seem to be interested in x86-64, were we don't have 
_any_ standard install  ISO (only the one with the chroot tarball).
We have to get something done...


Thomas.

PS: What's now with the stable-rc issue with init.d and LVM? Did anyone have 
time to look into that? Can it be so difficult?