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Re: "up to date at all costs" is a failed approach
* On 2024年07月15日 at 19:58 BST, Alistair Crooks wrote:
I'm aware that you previously maintained long-term branches - can you share
your experience with that?
Also, I imagine this is potentially a time-sink - can you help us
understand what we'd need to do to back in you in this?
I think they've worked well, especially with the way we distribute our
images. Users can choose to either install an LTS OS image and then get
3 years of important security updates for it, or install a trunk image
and get rolling updates forever (though depending on the state of pkgsrc
it can be some time between updates).
Even though I try to steer users towards the trunk images so that they
aren't forced to go through big upgrades every few years, the LTS images
are still popular. Users are very happy with having a relatively stable
set of packages that receive important security and stability updates,
and we use them internally a lot as e.g. base platforms for our OS
builds.
Having automated builds has been the most important thing for me, very
closely followed by git. Most changes are a simple "git cherry-pick",
and then my Jenkins infrastructure handles everything automatically all
the way through to publishing after I "git push".
Time is obviously the limiting factor, and while I backport what I can,
there's always more to do, and it does get harder the older a branch
gets as you may also need to backport some infrastructure changes, so in
reality the older LTS branches do receive fewer updates over time.
Many times I've thought about giving up with pkgsrc trunk and just
maintaining my own tree, but realistically it's just too much work for
one person, so it would only be viable if enough other people were
interested in working on it too, both through providing build hosts for
the more exotic platforms, as well as working on proposed changes and
guiding them through the vetting process.
--
Jonathan Perkin - mnx.io - pkgsrc.smartos.org
Open Source Complete Cloud www.tritondatacenter.com
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