[csw-users] Reverted updates to the dublin catalog

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2012/6/19 Nils Ludvig Brandtzæg <ludvigb at gmail.com>:
> So "testing" will soon point to kiel instead of dublin? Do you have an
> estimate of when for example subversion-1.7.5 (currently in unstable)
> will be in testing?

We don't have any estimates right now, sorry. There's an ongoing
project to upgrade OpenSSL. It isn't trivial, because dependencies
between binaries and libraries sometimes cause two versions of the SSL
library to be loaded at the same time, which causes crashes, or failed
checks.

binary1 → libssl.so.1.0.0
binary1 → library1
library1 → libssl.so.0.9.8

(ouch!)

There's a project tracking page for the rebuild effort, you can get a
sense how much work it requires:

http://wiki.opencsw.org/project-openssl

We won't be able to responsibly call this “testing”, before the
upgrade to openssl-1.0.0 is complete, or at least when we know that
there are no double linkages between binaries.

Once we get that sorted out, we'll think about promoting unstable to
testing. But this means that we have to make space for new testing, by
promoting dublin to stable. We think that we can't just flip the
symlink. If there are users who pull packages from stable, and
suddenly upgrade a lot of packages from the 2008 package catalog to
the 2012 state, they might get a lot of problems, and we don't want
that. We need to warn users about this, and we don't really have a
mechanism to do this reliably. See this discussion:

http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/maintainers/2012-March/016249.html

There are some ideas to implement catalog checking in pkgutil, but
there are still sites using pkg-get, so we're not sure we can depend
on pkgutil either. Maybe intentionally breaking upgrades from the
stable URL for a period of, say, 6 months or so, would do the job.

So, overall, there is a number of issues and a lot of work ahead of us.

As far as the promotion of dublin to stable is concerned, input from
users would be greatly appreciated. Do people still use stable? Does
anyone have performed a migration/upgrade from stable to dublin? If
so, how did it go?

Maciej