* On 2024-07-15 at 19:58 BST, Alistair Crooks wrote:
I'm aware that you previously maintained long-term branches - can you share your experience with that? Also, I imagine this is potentially a time-sink - can you help us understand what we'd need to do to back in you in this?
I think they've worked well, especially with the way we distribute our images. Users can choose to either install an LTS OS image and then get 3 years of important security updates for it, or install a trunk image and get rolling updates forever (though depending on the state of pkgsrc it can be some time between updates).
Even though I try to steer users towards the trunk images so that they aren't forced to go through big upgrades every few years, the LTS images are still popular. Users are very happy with having a relatively stable set of packages that receive important security and stability updates, and we use them internally a lot as e.g. base platforms for our OS builds.
Having automated builds has been the most important thing for me, very closely followed by git. Most changes are a simple "git cherry-pick", and then my Jenkins infrastructure handles everything automatically all the way through to publishing after I "git push".
Time is obviously the limiting factor, and while I backport what I can, there's always more to do, and it does get harder the older a branch gets as you may also need to backport some infrastructure changes, so in reality the older LTS branches do receive fewer updates over time.
Many times I've thought about giving up with pkgsrc trunk and just maintaining my own tree, but realistically it's just too much work for one person, so it would only be viable if enough other people were interested in working on it too, both through providing build hosts for the more exotic platforms, as well as working on proposed changes and guiding them through the vetting process.
-- Jonathan Perkin - mnx.io - pkgsrc.smartos.org Open Source Complete Cloud www.tritondatacenter.com