Arch Linux

IceRAM

Member

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2004-03-04

Posts: 772

Website

Re: Archlinux current iso

I think it will be great that we release an "current iso" 2 time at month and 1 time at month if it wasnt too much movement.

... if there are no critical/high priority bugs marked for the packages in current, or dependency problem requiring rebuilding any of the packages.

Getting a perfectly working snapshot of current in this always upgrading distro might not be very easy.

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Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,175

Re: Archlinux current iso

I think it will be great that we release an "current iso" 2 time at month and 1 time at month if it wasnt too much movement.

... if there are no critical/high priority bugs marked for the packages in current, or dependency problem requiring rebuilding any of the packages.

Getting a perfectly working snapshot of current in this always upgrading distro might not be very easy.

Will you guarantee a perfectly working ArchLinux 0.8 iso? I assume that the newer a package is; the lesser bugs it contains

IceRAM

Member

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2004-03-04

Posts: 772

Website

Re: Archlinux current iso

I am not saying the the contents of the package might be buggy, but the integration with the other packages could create problems (some packages might need to be rebuilt with new libraries for example, some changes in the strucuture of a package might affect others etc.). Anyway, if this thing is implemented, somebody should be watching all this and make sure that, whenever an ISO is built, the resulting system is perfect.

This is why distros make releases every X months, because they do testing. People seeing ArchLinux ISOs comming evey month (or 2x per month) might believe: "wow, stable releases every month... oh boy" (just like for the major distros) - which is completely wrong.

Of course, if they are tagged as "Arch 0.7 - snapshot 2005-05-06" + many disclaimers saying:
1. Arch is a rolling distribution ("pacman -Syu" from time to time).
2. this is not a release
3. use it on your own rist
etc...
this might work.

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Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,175

Re: Archlinux current iso

I am not saying the the contents of the package might be buggy, but the integration with the other packages could create problems (some packages might need to be rebuilt with new libraries for example, some changes in the strucuture of a package might affect others etc.).

[...]

Isn't this what packagemaintainers already do? I do not agree with the extra checks you want to build in; since released packages are already supposted to be stable and compatible with each other

IceRAM

Member

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2004-03-04

Posts: 772

Website

Re: Archlinux current iso

Isn't this what packagemaintainers already do? I do not agree with the extra checks you want to build in; since released packages are already supposted to be stable and compatible with each other

Well, they already do that, but
* there are X package maintainers
* Y packages
* X << Y
* limited time && you can't stop time
* "ooops" can happen (usually gets corrected in 1-2 days) - this is rare, indeed

What if the create_iso script starts after exactly half of a repo upgrade? The 1 person (if there's such a person) running the script has no way of knowing all the upgrades (uploads) taking place at a moment (1 << X).

I do not want extra checks built in because it is very less likely you/we know what checks need to be done - you can't check everything automagically, some things are checked only by actually testing the result.

I'm just saying that extra care is needed ( & a disclaimer ).

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