On Sun, 2005-03-13 at 13:36 -0500, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote: [snip] > I don't see why this question is so inappropriate and irrelevant for > this list. In fact, it seems highly relevant to me, and I think > there should be a policy to keep backup versions of rpms in a > centralized place. I have needed such a thing on many occasions to > determine what was broken, or recover my system from a horrific crash, > due to Rawhide. I'm afraid I have to agree with Ivan here, Jeff. This is most definitely *highly* relevant to this list. I've never mentioned it myself before, but I have been meaning to bring it up. I'm sure hoping it doesn't start a flamewar or anything, but I do think it's important to bring up. The discussion belongs here, IMO, and not on fedora-test because it also applies to updates for released versions. What I'm referring to is the relatively quick disappearance of previous updates, as well previous versions from rawhide. A concern I've had about official updates disappearing, at least with respect to GPL/LGPL licensed software, is that these older updates should be made available for as long as the GPL requires (3 years?). Currently, they disappear when new updates show up (or shortly thereafter). I wouldn't worry about the licensing issue too much with rawhide given that it is 'in development' stuff, but it's still a bit extreme, IMO, for previous versions to disappear from the download.fedora.redhat.com immediately on appearance of the next version. I'm not naive, here: I do know that keeping two or three versions around means significant disk space concerns, not just for Red Hat, but for all the mirrors. Maybe a separate tree that a maximum of three versions could be maintained and instead of the rawhide update mechanism doing 'rm <rpm>', it could do 'mv <rpm> <backupdir>/<rpm>'. Mirrors can choose to mirror the backup dir or not. That's simplified of course, but I'm trying to promote some discussion of this. It's burned me more than once. -- -Paul Iadonisi Senior System Administrator Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux. GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets
