[packman] please, keep more than 1 version

[Marc Schiffbauer]

* Miguel Angel Alvarez schrieb am 22.01.08 um 19:50 Uhr:
> Hi all,

Hi Miguel,

> First of all, forgive me for breaking the thread, but I wasn't subscribed to 
> the list.
> 
> Continuing with my argumentation...
> I have put libxine-kaffeine just as a recent example. Some times is another 
> package, sometimes everything works nicely, and the issues may come from 
> upstream (just like in libxine), or happen only on some configurations. 
> 
> package management (or rsync) doesn't solve the issue with new installations, 
> and it seems that yast in 10.3 doesn't keep a local copy anymore (unless 
> there is some config option I have missed).
> 
> About the disk space needed, let's do some numbers:
> In the 10.3 branch: SRPM 5.2 GB, i586 3.9 GB, i686 26 MB, noarch 3.4 GB, ppc 
> 3.3 GB, x86_64 3.3 GB. That's 19.1 GB. Let's say 20 GB
> The four opensuse branchs are about 80 GB. That's some space, but not so much 
> by today's standards.

Not really.
Only the suse branch of packman has 61G now.

packman:~/ftp_pub_packman$ du -sh suse/
61G     suse/
packman:~/ftp_pub_packman$    

> 
> So, what if I donate a 250 GB (IDE or SATA2, I'm poor :-) ) hard disk? That 
> would make room enough for two more releases, and let plenty of free space.

Thats very kind of you, but that is not the real Problem. All this
stuff has to be mirrored all over the world. So you will have to
spend a HDD to every mirror-admin ;-). Or two because the need of
RAID.


> 
> About the management issue, I beg to differ. I think it could be easily done 
> with a script (bash, some python in the worst case), no need to do anything 
> by hand, just by using symlinks to keep track of the n releases (to be fair, 
> I still haven't dug deeply into the issue, but I can)

This is something that would be done by our internal scripts.

I understand what you want to achieve. But do you know any serious
repo for any distro where something like this is really done?

Often security issues are fixed with the next release, and then you
will want to get rid of the insecure package.

If you want to be 100% sure that everything works: have a test system
to test every new release or use an enterprise distro where the
vendor does this for you. Or always wait with an update until you
have confirmation from someone that everything worked fine.

Or, like already said: keep your own copy of the repo.

-Marc
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