On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 12:29 -0400, Kevin wrote: > One thing that I'm pretty sure is currently not possible with portage, > however, and that I'd definitely like to see as a part of this idea is a > way of setting thresholds on version numbers of packages in portage such > that the automated upgrade system will only upgrade a package > automatically if the difference in version numbers between the installed > package and the newest available package in portage is greater than some > admin-tunable amount. For example, I might not want to upgrade emacs or > xemacs just because a new -r number becomes available. Maybe I don't > want to have such a big package upgraded automatically unless there is a > new major or minor version number. > > Thanks again to all the developers who have made Gentoo. It's a really > terrific distro.
Jakub meant the portage-devel mailing list, not this one. Anyway, most of this can be done already using /etc/portage files and some well-written cron scripts. You can lock down versions of specific packages quite easily using your own package.mask and package.unmask files, along with package.keywords. However, one thing you can *never* do is assume that *any* package that has *any* kind of configuration files or is a library will *never* change in an incompatible way. Basically, what you want is the assurances of a binary distribution that things will "just work" when upgraded, yet you still want the power of Gentoo. Honestly, I don't see portage ever being able to really support anything like this so long as the tree continues to change. It simply doesn't seem to be compatible with how Gentoo development is done. Then again, I could be completely off my rocker and the portage team might already have all of this implemented in some super-secret internal-only version. As I said, this would probably be best conversed with them on the portage-devel list. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
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