FreeBSD-current: please accept this posting to close off the thread that your list saw half of. I'm going to kill this topic. Results of my trolling to see if we could get any committer interest in this topic are: 17 enterprises e-mailing me privately to agree that it sucks, but that they doubt it will ever change. Some notes about how we handle certain situations today exchanged. 2 e-mails from people working at the bsdupdates project. I explain again to them why we can't run GENERIC, and they agree that without core operation system support there's no easy way to handle this. 3 e-mails from people who've been burned trying to raise this topic before, suggesting that I run and hide after raising an issue like this. They don't believe it will happen. 12 or so honest queries on the mailing list about why "make buildworld" or the freebsd-update mechanism doesn't work for me. Which I try to answer in detail, even when the questioner was insulting me. 7 or so suggestions on the mailing list that I deliver a working solution before asking for consensus. 16-something people telling me that I clearly don't understand the problem, and that if I wasn't an idiot I could solve it using this or that. Most of which are tools we are using today, and know the limitations of pretty well. (none of whom actually delivered information about how to improve on this) 20-something people telling me that my shorthand for -core proves that I'm an idiot. It wasn't the topic, and it doesn't change the real question one bit, but it's a great chance for everyone to call me an idiot. 1,215,545 or thereabouts people writing me to call me an idiot, without much justification whatsoever. In short, the situation remains as before. A lot of need, but no solution. A lot of interest, but no belief that it will be accepted into the core operating system. No interest from any of the developers who could make this happen. Without any interest, you can't come up with a starting definition or goals for consensus. Thus there's no point in trying to build a team to do it. Kind of like invading Iraq without a clear objective and a plan. (sorry for the off-topic political reference, but it is apt) For now we'll have to see if Colin can find ways around the problems without the tools he needs to do it right. -- Jo Rhett senior geek SVcolo : Silicon Valley Colocation
On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:38, Jo Rhett wrote:> 20-something people telling me that my shorthand for -core proves that I'm > an idiot. It wasn't the topic, and it doesn't change the real question one > bit, but it's a great chance for everyone to call me an idiot.Am I in this category? I wonder.. Anyway.. Your use of nomenclature not matching that of the rest of the community is a sure fire way to be misunderstood and brushed off. Yes, people shouldn't just ignore you because you used the wrong name, but since those people are very busy they are guessing you are probably just a troll, or clueless.. This sort of attitude is necessary otherwise you'd waste heaps of time dealing with clueless people or trolls. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20060112/cd86e601/attachment.bin
On Thu, 2006-Jan-12 00:08:56 -0800, Jo Rhett wrote:>I'm going to kill this topic. Results of my trolling to see if we could >get any committer interest in this topic are:Deliberate antagonism of most (if not all) FreeBSD developers is unlikely to assist in getting your ideas listened to. You also left out the results of the assorted claims/promises you made: 1) "core" deliberately killed suggestions of improved binary update processes You have yet to produce the e-mails demonstrating this. 2) Your PRs get ignored. This has been disproven by examining the status of your PRs. It appears that you never received the status updates, but equally, you never appear to have bothered following up any of the PRs. 3) Your promise to provide a formal requirements specification defining exactly what you are asking for. Again, you have yet to produce the information you promised. -- Peter Jeremy
In message: <20060112205015.GA13244@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>
Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au> writes:
: 1) "core" deliberately killed suggestions of improved binary update
processes
: You have yet to produce the e-mails demonstrating this.
I can state authoritative and categorically that core did no such
thing. I dare anybody to prove me wrong.
Warner Losh
core team member
On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Jo Rhett wrote: <much unhappiness elided>> For now we'll have to see if Colin can find ways around the problems without > the tools he needs to do it right.It seems fairly clear to me that Colin's tools provide useful building blocks that can be used to create something like what you're looking for: it is an efficient way to generate, manage, and distribute difference sets between snapshots of a system. What Colin's pieces explicitly don't provide is a administrative infrastructure for imposing heavy weight packaging semantics and version information -- specifically, an explicit version database, roll-back, and a mechanism for configuration merges. I'm sure many sites would like to have the heavier weight mechanism, but it's certainly a non-trivial project that will take a lot of time for someone to get right. Someone(tm) will need to spend several months on it to get it really working well, but I think it would be well worth the effort. I do suspect, however, that the starting point for this is to discard the formal project releases, and instead simply provide infrastructure for someone with their own notion of what releases are, and what versions make sense. That way if a site chooses to deploy our stock releases or patches, that's fine, but they can also manage their own custom snapshots. Presumably a first starting point is to take the assumption that the build system will produce a series of install snapshots, presumably using installworld/installkernel to a specific DESTDIR, and that all updates will be generated between them, with version names and relevant difference combinations to be assigned to them by the admin. The second part will be handling what's normally done by mergemaster in some way -- for some environments, simply generating a second tarball that contains the output of distrib-dirs (etc) and then providing that to bootstrap mergemaster rather than a source tree would be sufficient. Other environments might wish to simply splat down replacement files based on having run mergemaster in advance on the build machine. A bit of minimal but well-crafted glue is presumably required here, such as the ability to point mergemaster at the update blob and tell it "Yeah, so, I want my / to be merged from here, not /usr/src/etc". The final part is the meta-data for these snapshots, both carried with them, and on the target system. If using Colin's binary difference pieces, they will often be quite compact, and it's easy to imagine storing the necessary information to roll back or forwards by several revisions in a relatively small amount of space. Tricky things include how to accomplish relative atomicity in updates. If we assume that the snapshot itself, along with possibly a version name/number (from, to), is basically sufficient meta-data, that's quite advantageous. It becomes the responsibility of the admin to not screw up by assigning the same name to multiple versions, etc. But as always, the tricky thing is someone actually doing the work. It's a non-trivial and time-consuming task, and isn't just a weekend's hacking. There will almost certainly be a number of "Oh damn, I didn't think of that!"'s along the way. I don't think anyone is opposed to it happening, but getting someone to do all that work with little recompense (or even significant recompense) requires some amount of convincing! Robert N M Watson
In message: <20060112080856.GI84964@svcolo.com>
Jo Rhett <jrhett@svcolo.com> writes:
: 20-something people telling me that my shorthand for -core proves that I'm
: an idiot. It wasn't the topic, and it doesn't change the real
question one
: bit, but it's a great chance for everyone to call me an idiot.
core@freebsd.org has a very specific meaning, that is well documented
in the FreeBSD handbook. As a member of the core team, I'm deply
offended by your inapprorpiate use of the term, and your intransigence
when people try to steer you to the 10 year+ established usage of that
term. I'm also deeply offended that you've accused us of doing
something very bad which we have not in fact done. I'm angry that
you've not even appologized for this misuse, but insist that somehow
your usage must be right, and everyone else must be wrong. Please use
the accepted meaning of the term if you want to be understood by the
rest of the community.
I never once called you an idoit. I only said that you were wrong and
dared you to prove me wrong. You've not taken me up on that offer I
see. Please do not confuse my telling you that your facts are
incorrect with any kind of name calling. I'll bet that 19 of the 20
people you claim called you an idiot were in fact just pointing out
your mistake and that none of them used the word idiot to describe you
or your mistake.
Thank you for your attention to these details...
Warner
On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:08:56 -0800, "Jo Rhett" <jrhett@svcolo.com> said:> 12 or so honest queries on the mailing list about why "make buildworld" > or the freebsd-update mechanism doesn't work for me. Which I try to > answer > in detail, even when the questioner was insulting me.Why doesn't make buildworld work for you? I find myself replacing binary packages with source more often than not, to effect a better tracking with cvs. I'm guessing, but it sounds like you're after some sort of replacement to the cvs approach in binary form. Right? -- Aluminium Oxide orac000@internet-mail.org -- http://www.fastmail.fm - One of many happy users: http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/quotes.html