On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 6:03 PM, James Tunnicliffe james.tunnicliffe@linaro.org wrote:
On 19 February 2013 16:08, Alexander Sack asac@linaro.org wrote:
On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 2:53 PM, James Tunnicliffe james.tunnicliffe@linaro.org wrote:
Good point! I would be pleasantly surprised if an image + hwpack from 2010 worked with our current tools.
Actually, I am surprised if they do not work.
Our official promise on lit has always been that:
- all hwpacks and rootfs ever produced before a lmc release will
work with that lmc 2. lmc will work well on most recent Ubuntu release as well as on all Ubuntu LTS still supported by Canonical
So moving forward let's do this:
- find out if latest lmc works with the hwpack/rootfs stuff above -
maybe it is all good actually - the wiki instructions refer to an old lmc version.
- ensure that we have hwpack rootfs version as old as the above in our CI
- use this opportunity to review if our CI tests have other gaps that
we need to fill to know whether we are green wrt 1. and 2. above
- fix failures including removing online requirement when they come up.
Guess a blueprint about "lmc legacy support investigation and resurrection" might be the way to go.
Interesting. We have had a blueprint about dropping Hardware Pack v1 support ready to go for a while. There is a lot of "if v1, else" code in Linaro Image Tools that we would like to get rid of.
In the original case we have an image based on an unsupported Ubuntu version, which no longer has packages on http://ports.ubuntu.com/dists/, so there is no way to support it since it can't be installed. It isn't useful to have non-functioning OS
It's not a given thing that it can't be installed. Actually, except for corner cases ALL the bits you need should be in rootfs and hwpack combined.
For me all hwpack/rootfs that don't have all the bits are actually BUGGY and I would like to kill online support from lmc just for the sake to ensure that our hwpacks/rootfs really have everything.
binaries on releases.linaro.org, so we should either delete them/move them to an archive location or perhaps put them behind a warning page. We could use BUILDINFO.txt to implement the warning.
That's an independent discussion.
Right now LMC is buggy as it cannot install stuff without the upstream archives still being there. Let's fix that first and then go and talk about a policy how to phase out old stuff (even though right now I believe all releases should stay around forever).
Our CI jobs for image tools only go back to Linaro 11.06. I don't know when our releases switched to use Ubuntu 11.04 but it would be around then. We could try going back further, but it may only get us 6 months of testing a release that very few people are using.
Yes, please go back to the oldest we have, treat them as bugs and systematically discuss case by case if we really don't support it.
Binaries from ports.ubuntu.com will vanish after their support window has expired, so it seems likely that 11.04 and 11.10 based images will be unusable in a years time.
As from above: our hwpacks should have everything they need in them. If not, its a hwpack bug and we want to know about them (through lmc hwpack-create and create failing unless you pass --download-missing-anyway or something).
James