Raymond Wooninck composed on 2015-02-09 21:06 (UTC+0100):
I am wondering what the strategy of the openSUSE distribution is with regards to the base system packages. Lately I have seen that quite a number of these packages (e.g. systemd, dracut) are on very old versions, but contain a very high number of patches (most of the time even more than one hundred).
Given this situation I am wonder what happened to the strategy to follow upstream releases and to update packages to the latest versions available (something that Tumbleweed is promising). It seems as if the maintainers here are following an old approach where a package is updated to the latest release when a new distro version is started and then only update the package with patches. This approach might be understandable for a product like SLE, but is this also the right approach for openSUSE ?
Also I wonder if with this amount of patches the stability of these important packages (as they are part of the base system) is really guaranteed. In my opinion it would be very hard to keep all those patches separated and updating such packages to the latest version could become a nightmare.
In many areas we are trying to stay as close to upstream as possible, but it seems that this is not happening in the most important area (the base system) and I am wondering why.
It seems to me that maintaining an old version with a high number of patches is more like a guarantee of instability than stability, at least WRT systemd, which is in relative terms quite youthful, and in constant state of change as new discoveries of incompatibility are made and dealt with, or, or put on a TODO list, or not. One of these instabilities has been the reboot process. I do a lot of testing that involves restarts. Since the advent of systemd, rebooting has often been a far more lengthy process than it was in sysvinit releases. Last night as example I must have spent over an hour waiting for shutdowns to complete, or fscks on reboot after pulling the plug when shutdown refused to proceed past "failed to store sound card state" or some "starting..." process at a time when stoppings should be the only things happening. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-January/027536.html notes a fix directed to reboot failures. I have to wonder whether it will be seen in openSUSE before the current Tumbleweed morphs into the next openSUSE release, which would not help Evergreen-next, aka 13.1, or 13.2, both of which lately have been stubborn in delaying or preventing shutdown in reasonable time, if allowing shutdown/reboot at all short of using the power switch or plug. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org