[gentoo-alt] Profile names for legacy systems?

[Benda Xu]

Hi Friends,

Now a Prefix on amd64 GNU/Linux has 3 profiles:

,----
| $ eselect profile list
| Available profile symlink targets:
| [1] prefix/linux/amd64
| [2] prefix/linux-standalone/amd64 *
| [3] prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/legacy
`----

The [1] is the traditional rpath, the [2] is for RAP and the [3] is for
RAP on systems with linux kernel <2.6.32.

Things become more complicated when sys-libs/glibc-2.26 requires

=linux-3.2.0 on all the architectures[a]. That means we will have 2

legacy profiles, one for <linux-2.6.32 and another for >=linux-2.6.32
and <linux-3.2.0.

In academia and supercomputing centers, OS upgrades are rather
conservative. I still see OS with linux-2.6.9 (RHEL 4) serving critical
tasks in the wild. That said, we are still able to support these legacy
systems. The question is what profile name scheme should be used?

My baseline proposal is like this:

- prefix/linux-standalone/amd64: the newest profiles

- prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/before_3.2.0: <linux-3.2.0

mask >=glibc-2.26 for x86 and amd64, >=glibc-2.24 for all others

- prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/before_2.6.32: <linux-2.6.32

same as "prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/legacy".


Whenever glibc bumps its minimal kernel requirement, a news item should
be pushed out to tell users to consider switching to the legacy
profiles.

What do you think? Is there a better profile name than before_3.2.0?

Cheers,
Benda

a. https://bugs.gentoo.org/639152