Richard Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> posted 4a2baaa9.4030...@gentoo.org, excerpted below, on Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:55:21 -0400:
> As far as an upgrade path goes - we could provide a one-time tarball > that will update portage (and its essential dependencies) to a version > that can get users out of this bind. If a user has a system THAT old > then they might just want to extract a stage1 tarball (manually - > without overwriting /etc without care) and go from there. We've done the tarball thing a couple times before, with portage I think, with amd64/gcc for certain, as it was needed to get out of some sort of multilib and profile based bind IIRC, and with the in-tree profiles (from pre-cascade profiles) at least once too, IIRC. > I'm not sure that gentoo generally supports graceful upgrades from very > ancient systems to modern ones without keeping up to date. Other > distros can do it since they do ~annual releases and users could just > apply those sequentially. For portage we don't keep around all the > files needed to do a sequential upgrade like this - if a user were to > try to upgrade to a 3-year-old version of some package most likely it > wouldn't be mirrored and upstream might not have it either. AFAIK from what I've read here over the years, Gentoo tries to keep smooth in-tree upgrades to a year out. Beyond that, we don't usually deliberately break it without some warning and a tarball or similar upgrade path for another six months to a year, but it's by no means guaranteed it'll be a smooth upgrade after a year even if we aren't deliberately breaking it. Generally, beyond a year, it's recommended that one uses the stage tarball to get something at least operationally modern, and goes from there. Simply put, Gentoo's NOT in practice a distribution for the folks who like to lollygag around for years between updates. Tho we do try to support it up to a year out and to provide at least some form of likely non-routine upgrade option beyond that, it definitely works best and with the least trouble for those updating every month or at least once a quarter, with things getting progressively more difficult and troublesome the further out beyond that you go, simply because of lack of testing if nothing else. > We obviously need to give some thought to not breaking old versions of > portage, but given that portage will be only one of many problems if a > user doesn't do an emerge -u world for 5 years I'm not sure we need a > bulletproof solution... I just realized that I'm right about at my Gentoo 5-year anniversary, with an original installation of 2004.1. (I tried 2004.0 but it didn't work for some reason I never did figure out, but perhaps related to the then new NPTL, which I was trying to enable.) I can't /imagine/ first installing it then, and coming back to it now, expecting anything but a full reinstall from stage tarball (assuming as suppose I would be if I had been that out of it, that was still even /using/ stage tarballs as it was then). Imagine people wondering what happened to xfree86, among other things. I mean, talk about a time- traveler getting confused by the future! -- 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
