On 03/02/13 10:51, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> On 02/03/2013 10:49 AM, Greg KH wrote:
>> Hi all.
>>
>> So Tumbleweed is, I think, almost 2 years old now.
> Thank you for your excellent work on this
>> It seems to be
>> working fairly well, or at least well enough for my daily use, and I
>> haven't heard any complaints about it in a long time which means that
>> either no one is using it, or it's working for others :)
> I am using it for 1+ year now and it is working great. I am upgrading
> once a month.
> The only 2 issues I have:
> 1. some dev projects have not yet created tumbleweed repositories on OBS
> (I have taken care of that for things that I maintain)
> 2. some updates from openSUSE-current-oss-updates are incompatible with
> current package versions. Perhaps there should be a
> Tumbleweed-oss-updates repository to port those updates.
> 
>>
>> Anyway, with the advent of 12.3 soon, I have been thinking if Tumbleweed
>> needed to change any to make things work better.
>>
>> My original set of complaints a year or so ago about OBS issues that
>> keep us having a "proper" rolling distribution, still pretty much are
>> the same:
>>    - the build-number issue
>>    - build speed
>>    - dependancy rebuild problems.
> I think that this is similar to my update issues :)
>>
>> Build speed of OBS has increased recently, I don't know if it's just my
>> imagination, or if I have a higher priority for my repos now, or if new
>> hardware really was added to the build system, but I'm happy things seem
>> to be working better in that area at the moment.
>>
>> But the other two issues are still big ones, as the recent GNOME update
>> in Tumbleweed proved quite well.
>>
>> So, I was thinking about maybe, when 12.3 changing Tumbleweed from being
>> an "add-on" repo on top of the 12.3 repos, to being a "full" distro
>> snapshot.  That would resolve the build number problems we have had, but
>> the dependancy rebuild issue would increase.
> This is a great idea. Is there a plan on how to sync during a stable
> release though?
>>
>> The rebuild problem can be manually handled, much like FACTORY currently
>> is, but odds are, I would lean toward the conservative side, having more
>> rebuilds than are probably necessary just to ensure that systems work
>> well.  That means that libreoffice would be updated on a weekly basis
>> for users, which might get annoying over time :)
> Is it really necessary to update libre-office so often? Perhaps packages
> that cause big file downloads should be kept to once per 2 weeks or
> more. Thoughts?
>>
>> Any thoughts by anyone about this?  Or should I just do it and see how
>> well it works out?
>>
>> thanks,
>>
>> greg k-h
> Thanks,
> Angelos
> 
> 

Hej,

I've been using Tumbleweed for a long while as well and I am very happy
with it, the last update to 12.2 went without a *single* contact on my
side, which was really quite amazing!

I am pretty satisfied overall, though I do agree that the build-number
issue calls for creative solutions. I am currently handling this via
repository priorities, but that's not ideal for some people, though I
haven't really had any problems despite a number of extra repositories.

While I personally don't mind bigger updates coming in frequently, I
agree with Angelos that this might be a problem for other users with
slower connections and/or bandwidth caps.

For what it's worth, I'd say try the snapshot idea and see how it works.
I'm sure you will hear us crying if it breaks absolutely everything! ;)

Cheers for the great work Greg!

All the best,
Peter
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org
To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Greg,


On 02/03/2013 10:23 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 12:51:41PM +0200, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> On 02/03/2013 10:49 AM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> Hi all.
>>>
>>> So Tumbleweed is, I think, almost 2 years old now.
>> Thank you for your excellent work on this
>>> It seems to be
>>> working fairly well, or at least well enough for my daily use, and I
>>> haven't heard any complaints about it in a long time which means that
>>> either no one is using it, or it's working for others :)
>> I am using it for 1+ year now and it is working great. I am
>> upgrading once a month.
>> The only 2 issues I have:
>> 1. some dev projects have not yet created tumbleweed repositories on
>> OBS (I have taken care of that for things that I maintain)
> That normally shouldn't be needed, unless you have packages that depend
> on stuff like KDE or GNOME.

ok thanks for clearing this up. I thought the safe way was to have a 
tumbleweed repository, but I see your point.
>> 2. some updates from openSUSE-current-oss-updates are incompatible
>> with current package versions. Perhaps there should be a
>> Tumbleweed-oss-updates repository to port those updates.
> I have never heard of this, nor have ever seen this happen before, do
> you have an specific examples of packages with this problem?

I have just upgraded my system from Tumbleweed.
After that I run "zypper patch" and I get the following conflicts:

patch:openSUSE-2012-813-1.noarch conflicts with libpackagekit-qt2-2.i586
patch:openSUSE-2012-658-1.noarch conflicts with libpackagekit-glib2-14.i586

After I solve this conflict by installing the updates, I get more 
conflicts involving:
patch:openSUSE-2012-791-ksshaskpass
patch:openSUSE-2012-880-libgstreamer
patch:openSUSE-2012-552-kernel-firmware
patch:openSUSE-2012-813-yast2-qt-branding
patch:openSUSE-2012-587-gio-branding
patch:openSUSE-2012-685-kio_sysinfo-branding
patch:openSUSE-2012-701-kdm-branding

I assume those updates should be applied and then I have to upgrade the 
system once more?

>
> There should not be a need for the updates repo to have a tumbleweed
> repo, if I've done everything properly.
>
>>> So, I was thinking about maybe, when 12.3 changing Tumbleweed from being
>>> an "add-on" repo on top of the 12.3 repos, to being a "full" distro
>>> snapshot.  That would resolve the build number problems we have had, but
>>> the dependancy rebuild issue would increase.
>> This is a great idea. Is there a plan on how to sync during a stable
>> release though?
> The whole repo would get created from scratch and start over with the
> new stable update, much like it happens today.

excellent.

>
>>> The rebuild problem can be manually handled, much like FACTORY currently
>>> is, but odds are, I would lean toward the conservative side, having more
>>> rebuilds than are probably necessary just to ensure that systems work
>>> well.  That means that libreoffice would be updated on a weekly basis
>>> for users, which might get annoying over time :)
>> Is it really necessary to update libre-office so often? Perhaps
>> packages that cause big file downloads should be kept to once per 2
>> weeks or more. Thoughts?
> It's not a "need", the Libreoffice packages aren't getting updated, they
> are just getting rebuilt due to all of the dependancy issues in the
> distro (touch almost anything, and it will end up rebuilding.)  It's
> just the most visable example of the dependancy logic we have.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h

Thanks,
Angelos

-- 
Angelos Tzotsos
Remote Sensing Laboratory
National Technical University of Athens
http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org
To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On 04.02.2013 14:40, Marcus Meissner wrote:

On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 08:01:12AM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

...

On Sunday 2013-02-03 09:49, Greg KH wrote:

...

Build speed of OBS has increased recently, I don't know if it's just my imagination, or if I have a higher priority for my repos now, or if new hardware really was added to the build system, but I'm happy things seem to be working better in that area at the moment.

Download numbers influence priority I hear, so that may indeed be why.

Not automatically. The priority is configured manually somewhere I guess.

No, it's automatic and is overlayed by a rather small manual set. But tumbleweed is special anyway as the automatism filters out openSUSE: namespace as that would dominate the whole thing too much. So tumbleweed is indeed part of the manual set and has the same prio as most devel projects. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 02:42:58PM +0100, Richard Brown wrote:

On 2 March 2013 11:03, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:

...

The only "issue" I keep having for the first one to three weeks of a new openSUSE + Tumbleweed rebase (and about which we just don't agree) is that it doesn't always happen when it's convenient for me to rebase my laptop, and that I want to keep history around for a few days so I can bisect/compare if needed. But I decided to make myself unpopular with the OBS team and help myself this time ;-) (home:LarsMB:Tumbleweed-12.2)

I would also say this is the biggest 'complaint' I've heard from our Tumbleweed users throughout the community. I understand how it came to be, but the rebase is certainly a pain point which is a source of some frustration to users

Really? Why is this an issue, you don't have to change your repo pointers anymore, it just takes a long time to do the first upgrade, and then all is fine. No matter what, that is going to happen. I don't want to be separate from the main openSUSE development stream, sorry. That would be skirting all of the wonderful, and valuable, work that the distro developers do all the time. And it would require me to do that work instead, something that I sure don't have the time to do, and I doubt very many other people do either.

While I think Tumbleweed is a great project and love the fact we have users to love it, I personally, I have an issue with Tumbleweed as I feel it's current approach isn't well aligned with the development of the main distribution.

Why? It directly builds on our main distribution. It relies on it. Without that distro work, it would be impossible to do.

I think that a number of people who would previously be testers are now drawn to Tumbleweed, rather than testing Factory - I speak from experience, as my original interest in Factory was born out of a desire for the latest and greatest, and it's through that use of Factory that I ended up the contributor to the project I am today.

That's great, Factory needs to be tested, please go do that if you want to, that's much more valuable work than using Tumbleweed.

Tumbleweed addresses the issue with stability when using Factory, but I think goes too far by basing itself on released versions, and I believe we end up with the worst of both worlds, not the best.

Why?

To illustrate, when users report bugs in Tumbleweed, I fear there is a tendency to assume it's an issue with Tumbleweed, and therefore bugs which are also present in the main distribution are left unfixed.

Where have you seen this be reported? I sure haven't.

Worse than that, because of Tumbleweeds nature, being based on released openSUSE versions, when bugs do crop up, we have the whole maintenance process which, while makes perfect sense for a stable distribution like openSUSE, I fear is a needless extra step for a rolling release like Tumbleweed, and makes it more work to get Tumbleweed fixes into Factory, when in fact quite often they're more relevant to Factory than anywhere else.

What's wrong with the maintenance process? It's quite valuable and there for a good reason. Why do you want to skip it?

Ideally, I'd like to see Tumbleweed evolve into something like a 'factory-stable', cherry picking Factory so users can benefit from the new versions on a stable, but rolling, platform, while still feeding in any bugs or suggestions into the Factory development process, and ultimately help make the whole distribution better, rather than something else tacked on it's side.

Feel free to create a distro like that if you want, that's not my goal here. I think you will find it a whole lot more work is involved in doing something like this, sorry.

As Factory is a rolling release, issues like the rebase would disappear, but there are some issues that would need to be addressed.

The biggest one that leaps out is the issue of Tumbleweed sometimes wanting newer versions of packages than we can put in Factory because of Factory's current focus as 'the next release version'..

Really? When have I ever wanted a newer version in Tumblweed than is in Factory?

However, we already hit this issue during the freezes, so we end up the end of any release process with Factory rolling on and 'almost-released' versions being populated with select copies of stuff from Factory

I think this approach has worked out very well for 12.3, and maybe that is the answer for Tumbleweed? Redefine Tumbleweed as factory-stable, with it's packages a snapshot/selection from factory, chosen using the same approach as Tumbleweed today.

Nope, sorry, again, that's way too much work for someone like me doing this. If you want to try it, please do, and let us know how it goes :) good luck, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 09:29:20PM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:

I've contemplated doing that. Basically, cherry-pick (like Tumbleweed), but *eventually cherry-pick everything* (like a true rolling distro), so that one would effectively be following stable (in due distance).

Problem with that is it's not always easy to disentangle, and isn't as easy as "and now we merge package X", because sometimes additional patches would be required if you're ready to accept X, but not yet Y.

I think that's the way to do a Linux distro (even a commercial one), but my job doesn't leave enough time to do that. With the talk of Ubuntu switching to a rolling model now, we'll see where that goes, maybe it'll be fresh inspiration.

I think that's the proper way forward as well, and maybe, if the build system updates work out, we can create something like that. But for now, I'll stick with the current model, it works best with the limited resources we have. thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 09:44:20PM +0200, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:

On 2013-04-10T12:42:07, Greg KH wrote:

...

I think that's the proper way forward as well, and maybe, if the build system updates work out, we can create something like that.

Nice!

Do you think the build system is mostly hardware constrained to achieve this, or are their other topics we should prioritize?

Right now it looks like hardware constraints. Oh, I think we need a "smarter" way to handle rebuild dependancies as well. Right now we either rebuild "everything", or you have to do it by hand (like Colo does for Factory). That will take some OBS work, which I've been staying away from :) greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, 2013-03-02 at 10:29 -0800, Greg KH wrote:

...

As Factory is a rolling release, issues like the rebase would disappear, but there are some issues that would need to be addressed.

The biggest one that leaps out is the issue of Tumbleweed sometimes wanting newer versions of packages than we can put in Factory because of Factory's current focus as 'the next release version'..

Really? When have I ever wanted a newer version in Tumblweed than is in Factory?

Current example? Kernel! openSUSE:12.3 (3.7.2) (which is supposedly to be your new base) AND openSUSE:Factory (3.7.7) have kernel 3.7, whereas Tumbleweed has Kernel 3.8 (3.8.1). I know, for you the kernel is 'different' to the rest of the distribution... but should it be? Anyway: this marks a current example. Dominique -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 11:03:38AM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:

On 2013-02-03T09:49:33, Greg KH wrote:

...

Hi all.

So Tumbleweed is, I think, almost 2 years old now. It seems to be working fairly well, or at least well enough for my daily use, and I haven't heard any complaints about it in a long time which means that either no one is using it, or it's working for others :)

Hi Greg,

it is actually working very well for me and, in combination with a handful of select devel/beta repositories, provides me with a nice 'rolling' distro between official openSUSE releases.

It is a very useful middle-ground between openSUSE + official updates (too conservative for me) and following Factory (my employer wants me to work on my laptop, alas).

That's good to hear.

The only "issue" I keep having for the first one to three weeks of a new openSUSE + Tumbleweed rebase (and about which we just don't agree) is that it doesn't always happen when it's convenient for me to rebase my laptop, and that I want to keep history around for a few days so I can bisect/compare if needed. But I decided to make myself unpopular with the OBS team and help myself this time ;-) (home:LarsMB:Tumbleweed-12.2)

Yes, no matter what date I pick (too conservative or too soon), someone will complain about this, so it doesn't really bother me :)

...

So, I was thinking about maybe, when 12.3 changing Tumbleweed from being an "add-on" repo on top of the 12.3 repos, to being a "full" distro snapshot. That would resolve the build number problems we have had, but the dependancy rebuild issue would increase.

Would it resolve the build number problems completely?

Yes.

(Just out of curiosity, why is Tumbleweed building against 12.2, not 12.2:Updates right now?)

Hm, I don't remember, I think it was to prevent too many rebuilds from happening as libraries got updated for security updates. These types of updates wouldn't require rebuilds (otherwise the whole of the 12.2 repo would have needed rebuilds), so I assumed this was going to be safe. If this isn't true, I can change this, but so far, it seems to work fine.

And this would greatly increase the build system resources required, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Yes, and I'm worried about that as right now, with just the "limited" number of tumbleweed packages we have, it's taking 3-4 days to rebuild stuff. Something has really slowed the build system down recently, I'm hoping it's just the 12.3 updates kicking in, but in watching the monitor page, I'm not quite sure what it is. And this is thing that is keeping me from moving to this "full repo" model. None of my requests for build system "changes" from over a year or so ago seem to have been implemented (if they have, my apologies, but given the recent build times, it doesn't seem like it, so I probably have other complaints to make...) I have half-a-mind to just spin up a AWS instance, put obs on it, and see how long it takes to rebuild the whole distro and compare it with the build times we currently have. That would be a good test to see where the bottlenecks are at the moment.

...

The rebuild problem can be manually handled, much like FACTORY currently is, but odds are, I would lean toward the conservative side, having more rebuilds than are probably necessary just to ensure that systems work well. That means that libreoffice would be updated on a weekly basis for users, which might get annoying over time :)

This would put additional strain on the download servers too, and on the update speed for all users, wouldn't it?

I don't know if there is a strain on the download servers, is there? I've never heard of issues there, only on the build side.

I really like Tumbleweed, so if that makes things easier for you, go for it; but to me, the add-on repository hasn't been a problem and made it somewhat easier too (ability to tell where a package came from, how they differ, etc).

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org