[CentOS-virt] CentOS 6 Virt SIG Xen 4.6 packages available in centos-virt-xen-testing

Wed Feb 10 17:07:11 UTC 2016
George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu>

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 7:17 PM, Sarah Newman <srn at prgmr.com> wrote:
> On 01/21/2016 04:32 AM, George Dunlap wrote:
>
>> I'm a developer, not a server admin, so I can't gauge how important
>> this issue is.  Before making such a change, I'd like to hear opinions
>> from other people in the community about how important (or not) it is
>> to avoid breaking xm, given the ample warning (>1 year) users have
>> had.
>>
>> On the other hand, explicitly moving to a "xen${VER}" (both for C6 and
>> C7) would make it simpler for people to step up and maintain older
>> versions in parallel if anybody wanted to do so.
>
> My inclination is towards a naming scheme like xen46, xen48, etc + a meta package that always depends on the latest. It should be more obvious when
> there's a major upgrade, and those who can't afford a major upgrade can uninstall the meta package.

BTW, we had a discussion about this particular idea at the Virt SIG
meeting, and KB said that different naming of packages like this can
cause dependency problems.  For example, a package depends on
"xen-version >= $N" will fail because as far as rpm is concerned, you
don't have package 'xen' installed at all.

Another idea is to keep separate repos, and then have
"centos-release-xen-$VERSION", which would always point to $VERSION,
and "centos-release-xen", which would always be the newest version.
That might satisfy both types of people.

 -George