2.0 packages being removed from avalon

[Vincent Stemen]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 07:24:39PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     I don't see any major problem keeping as much as 2-years worth of
>     packages around.  Security issues do crop up but from the point
>     of view of someone having to make the choice between spending
>     5 minutes adding an older version of a package verses potentially
>     a day upgrading the entire system, I'd rather the person had that
>     choice to make.

Exactly.  Up to at least 2 years is about what I was thinking.  If
packages are only available for the cutting edge, I think it limits the
market for production use.  It is not uncommon for us to leave machines
up for months or even years without touching them.  For example, our
firewall, which is still running Dragonfly 1.8.0-RELEASE has been up for
272 days prior to today, when it got shutdown to rearrange cables.  And
it's power supply fan has been locked since June!  :-).  

In fact it was already a somewhat old installation when I installed
asterisk on it to use as our PBX VOIP server without having NAT issues.
Luckily the packages were still available at the time, so I just had to
download it and do a pkg_add.  I didn't want to bring our whole network
down for hours to do it.
 

>     Software basically starts accumulating security and obsolesence
>     issues from the day it is released so it is kinda hard to argue for
>     specific break points.
>     
> 						-Matt

In fact, I don't know about now days, but that was one of my big gripes
about NetBSD prior to our changing over to Dragonfly.  They started
deleting and/or moving their binary packages all the time.  Every time
we needed to install a new package on any of our machines, they were
gone.  Even for releases that were not all that old.  When they move
them around all the time, it breaks our pre-configured tools for
downloading them.  I was happy to see that Dragonfly is much more
consistent about the package locations.

Also, if it's a concern at all, I think it will lessen your bandwidth
consumption by keeping them around longer because people like us will
just download what we need when we need it, rather then downloading the
entire collection just in case we might need something in the future,
since they might not still be there next week.

-Vince