On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 4:36 PM, George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu> wrote: > A couple of weeks ago I was just about to push an update of Xen 4.4 to > Xen 4.6 to the Virt SIG repositories, and I suddenly got some > push-back from the users, because Xen 4.6 has some fairly significant > changes -- particularly the removal of the old toolstack daemon called > xend. (xend had been disabled by default and had lots of messages > warning about the upcoming deprecation, even in 4.4.) > > It seems some users have the expectation that they should be able to > run "yum update -y" on their servers on a regular basis, without > having to worry about accidentally updating to a new major version > that break things. > > So one thing that was proposed was that we make separate packages > somehow, such that users would have to actively request the newer > version rather than getting it automatically. (This could be done > either by having a package named xen46, or by having separate > centos-release-xen-46 package that pointed to an entirely different > repository.) > > But of course, other users pushed back on that idea, saying they would > always rather have the latest version Just Work, and didn't like the > idea of having to manually keep track of what version was installed on > any given system, or of actually finding out that there's a new > package and what that new package name is. > > KB and I chatted about it at the Virt SIG meeting, and decided that we > should touch base with the other SIGs to have a consistent message. > > As for my own opinion: I can see both sides of the story, and as a > package maintainer I'd be willing to do either one. > > But on the whole I tend to side with the "latest version" crowd. I > think you should always be looking at what "yum update" gives you > before installing it; even minor updates I can't guarantee are going > to break things. And I'd rather the installation instructions be > simple (don't have to mess around with version numbers), and I'd > rather people not have to fish around for major updates (or run > packages with unpatched security vulnerabilities because they didn't > realize their packages were now obsolete). > > What do other SIGs think? Splitting the difference from a user point of view, here's another option: * Have a separate repo for each major version * Have the centos-release-xen-NN packages which always point to a specific repo * Have the centos-release-xen package always point to the most recent repo This is a tiny bit more infrastructure work, but makes it easier to test both minor releases and major releases; it also makes it easier for volunteers to step up and maintain older versions if they want. -George