[csw-maintainers] Preview of the new mirror structure available

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi Phil,

Am 09.11.2009 um 19:43 schrieb Philip Brown:
> On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 2:23 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org>  
> wrote:
>>
>> The larger customers of ours have own mirrors from where they  
>> install.
>> However, the smaller installation just subscribe to current/. When an
>> inexperienced admin just wants to add a package and by error updates
>> the catalog there is no way other then to update the dependencies of
>> the package to be installed as there is neither an unchanged location
>> for scubscription nor the old archived catalog.
>
> and for the vast majority of customers, this is a GOOD THING! This is
> a "feature", not a bug!
> It is detrimental to have out of date, older versions of things.
>
> It is only at sites where they have to be really really careful about
> upgrades and changes, that this behaviour is a problem.
>
> We should make sure that we optimize for the common best case.
>
> We should also give mechanisms for the "picky sites" to accomplish
> what they need to do from our packages. However, if we just had
> regular "stable" releases again, we would accomplish this pretty well.

Now that we talk about it I remember that I wanted to do this
initially for stable: Keep released versions so that shops can
upgrade at the pace they want instead of the release cycle.

Apart from that:
There are troubled waters ahead. Most server packages need updating,
we have no build recipes for the existing ones, the directory layout
will change away from /opt/csw to /etc and /var, version upgrades may
be incompatible. There are at least SASL, OpenLDAP, Kerberos and
Postgres that will likely break on upgrade. But this only slightly
related to the freezes. I'll open another thread when I'm ready for
this.

>> The freezes are not
>> meant as replacement for stable, but as substitute to subscribe to
>> in addition to current/.
>
> Perhaps you meant "as an alternative choice to current".

Äh, yes. Didn't I say that? Anyway, that's what I meant.


Best regards

   -- Dago