ports tree tagging again

[Jean-Yves Lefort]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:33:35 +0400
Roman Bogorodskiy <novel at freebsd.org> wrote:

> I. Problems
> 
> There are few things that I don't like in freebsd ports:
> 
> 1. Binary packages are almost useless
> 
> The chance to install all that you need using 'pkg_add -r' and some given
> time are very low. Some packages are outdated, some of them was not
> build because something of its dependencies failed, etc. That's very
> annoying... so you have to build almost everything yourself. It's just a
> waste of time, esp. if you have not very fast box. And it's not always
> possible to set up a local box for building packages, etc.
> 
> 2. Port tree is unstable
> 
> IMO, port tree is not very stable. I mean: we're all human and more or
> less often make mistakes and inaccurate commits. So you cannot be sure
> that if you cvsup/portsnap your tree, it will not break something
> (e.g. because of some typo). It's OK to have such errors in general, and
> we can do nothing with it, but there are a lot of silly errors which
> could be avoided and you definitely don't deal with on a stable system.
> 
> II Solutions
> 
> Yeah, I'm going to talk about ports tree tagging again :-). So what I
> propose: having HEAD and STABLE (or whatever you want't to call it, 
> so e.g. not to confuse with src/) branches. Committers commit all 
> patches to HEAD first. Then they wait for two things:
>   - For next run on pointyhat to find out if package builds well
>     (for a start, we could wait only for 6.x/i386 builds)
>   - User feedback. Like, if there's no complains like "ahh, it
>     broke everyhting, ahaha, please backout!", so everything's ok
> 
> If both conditions are meat, the commit may be backported to STABLE.
> After some time, when the dust will settle up, STABLE will be really
> 'stable' and most of the ports in STABLE would build OK. So package
> building will be much faster, cause all ports will be in a rather good
> shape and it won't happen that a dozen ports fail just because of
> dependency problem. So we could have more or less working binary 
> packages ready to use, and always more or less stable branch. Now,
> when you cvsup ports, you cannot be sure everything works, moreover,
> something really importand maybe be broken, like e.g. bsd.sites.mk
> typos, etc. And it will cause extra pain cvsupting the tree again.
> So for systems where you care about stability, you could use STABLE.
> 
> And about freezes, we can make them shorter with such an approach.
> We could tag RELEASE_X_Y of STABLE, no HEAD, so it would not take
> much time to fix all issues. And HEAD still will be open.
> 
> Note that I'm not proposing keeping RELEASE_X_Y as security branch like
> it was proposed several times, though it's not incompatible with the
> approach described above.

I agree with your analysis and solution.

-- 
Jean-Yves Lefort

jylefort at FreeBSD.org
http://lefort.be.eu.org/
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