On 12/05/2012 08:47 AM, Greg Swift wrote:
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Ken Dreyer <ktdreyer(a)ktdreyer.com
<mailto:ktdreyer@ktdreyer.com>> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Greg Swift <gregswift(a)gmail.com
<mailto:gregswift@gmail.com>> wrote:
> I'm personally inclined to lean toward the concept I was pushing
in the
> thread discussing multiple versions [1]. I'd imagine that a 'api
stable'
> repo and a 'rolling' repo would be less support effort than
attempting to
> manage >8 repositories per major release and the security updates
that need
> to be applied on older version.
My main concern with multiple EPEL repos is that users will be in a
worse condition security-wise. Many users will download an application
from the "api stable" repo, but they will not realize that no one is
doing backports any more, because all the interested EPEL maintainers
left that behind to focus on the "rolling" repo.
The analogy that comes to my mind is Fedora: What if we kept old
Fedora releases going back all the way to Fedora 6 open to maintainers
to patch on a voluntary basis, and we never really announced EOL for
any Fedora release? Fedora users would have to know enough to keep
jumping along with whatever's maintained.
It seems to me that we have to choose between occasional instability
and insecurity. I'd rather EPEL's reputation err on the side of
instability rather than insecurity.
I can back that line of thought. Plus providing 1 path means less
change! :)
> So, unless someone wants to turn EPEL into a paid service, #1 is out
> (hey... thats an interesting concept...)
Maybe money does have to enter the picture at some point. Corporations
should commit to pay salaries for more developers to do EPEL backports
if it's important to their businesses.
So... anyone got any motivation in pushing a product internally @ Red
Hat that does this? :)
Also.... I hadn't mentioned it before on here, because in general
mentioning tends to mean you have to do it and I don't really have the
cycles available. But as of this morning I figured I'd float the
concept anyways.
What would it take to basically have a yum plugin would check a
'notification' feed (something simple like rss or atom) about a specific
repository. Notifications found on that feed would throw messages in
the yum output and /var/log/messages. This feed could provide notices
like 'Hey, this version is deprecated and insecure, you need to
update'. An extension of this might be that it marks the package as an
'exclude' if it can't just be updated without interference. This would
allow a notification method, and a way for users to not get an update if
its going to break them, but also allowing the main page to just
continuously be updated.
Then this package could possibly be a required package from the
epel-release package.
-greg
Not volunteering at the moment because I don't have the cycles, but I
really like that idea.
Something similar, except opposite, of the security plugin. If a
package has the "breakable update" option set, then don't update it
unless they do the "--reallyupdate" option. But also give them a nag
that says the package has an update.
Troy