On Sep 19, 2017 6:05 PM, "Aristedes Maniatis" <ari at
ish.com.au> wrote:
Matthew Seaman wrote:>
> Ports are still being built according to the same policy -- on the
> earliest still-supported release of each major branch.
>
> It's just that now, for 11.x and subsequent, 11.0 goes out of support a
> month or so after 11.1-RELEASE comes out. You're meant to have
upgraded
> by now. The 11.0 -> 11.1 upgrade is intended to be a pretty routine
> thing that you can do about as freely as you can apply a security patch
> or other update within the 11.0 series.
I'm afraid this hasn't made things clearer for me at all.
1. What does the "stable" branch mean if the ABI is no longer stable
FreeBSD has always had a policy of backwards compatibility. By that
definition we are stable. What we don't promise is full forwards
compatibility, which is what you are asking for.
2. This policy of changing the ABI means that upgrading from 11.0 to 11.1
is now less routine than it used to be in the old days. Each minor update
is more like the effort involved in upgrading 10 -> 11. So I'll be doing
it
less often, not more often.
How so? All the old binaries work. It's running new binaries on old systems
that's a problem.
3. Packages are located in a namespace like this: https://pkg.freebsd.org/
freebsd:11:x86:64 But now I don't know which release this is actually
pointing to or which packages will work.
4. /etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf points to url:
"pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${
ABI}/quarterly" However this is now wrong. If I am delayed in upgrading my
system, downloading packages from there will sometimes break things. And I
will not know until runtime.
5. The package MANIFEST contains information about system compatibility.
That is just the major version, but we need the minor release version now
too.
Here are some possible solutions from where I'm sitting on the edges:
a. Go back to 'stable' meaning the ABI doesn't change. Not just the
kernel,
but the whole OS.
The definition hasn't changed in a decade.
b. Since there is no different in breakage and effort when going from 11.0
-> 11.1 or when going from 11.0 -> 12.0, just get rid of the point
releases
entirely. Then the existing packaging system still works.
c. Add point releases to the package manifest. We've have something like
https://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11.0:x86:64
d. Wait for some new base packaging magic to solve things.
Have I summarised this effectively?
Apart from the whole forwards backwards thing, which is sadly critical...
Warner
Ari
--
-------------------------->
Aristedes Maniatis
CEO, ish
https://www.ish.com.au
GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A
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