Stephen P. Becker posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Mon, 02 May 2005 12:33:24 -0400:
> Removing old profiles will do nothing other than forcing them to set a new > profile. Changing the profile won't stop people from doing security only > updates. Except that isn't quite correct, for that deprecated-profile-security-update-only person we're talking about. Such a person isn't likely to have a version of portage that can handle cascading profiles, which /is/ after all what the thread is about, and gcc and other parts of the toolchain are likely to be equally outdated (gcc-2.95, python 2.2, maybe earlier, etc). Remove their flat profile, and they may have an entirely broken portage, which they can't fix because they can no longer parse the tree, and may not be able to compile certain dependencies to get it working again even if they could. I haven't taken a look at the emergency procedures for a broken portage, recently, altho IIRC it now simply points to a place where a binary package can be downloaded. Are those procedures and binary package updated enough to cope with cascading profiles, while still being backward compatible with python 2.2 and gcc 2.95? Consider a user off the net, at least as far as the bandwidth necessary to do upgrades, for a year and a half. Maybe they were a missionary to some remote location for the period, or "unavoidably detained" for political or other reasons. They finally get back to "Internet civilisation", and find their Gentoo so outdated they can't even update it! Of course, if they're /that/ far out of date, perhaps a new install, stage-three and packages CD, is the most efficient way to get up and running again. That'd be my approach, if I found myself syncing after a year and a half out of circulation, and further assuming my machine (and personal know-how) was even more outdated, such that a stage-1 install didn't sound palatable. Is there a convenient profile archive somewhere? If not, perhaps one should be created, and at deletion from the tree, the profile dir in question is replaced with a file (or the empty dir with only that file) pointing to the archive. This archive could then keep the last workable profile snapshot around for another six months or so, or perhaps even forever, given the cost of storage now days. The pointer to it in the tree could then be removed 30 days or 6 months after the profile itself was removed, /forcing/ action on any laggards. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
