# gs-sources removed from portage

## ambrose_curtis

Has gs-sources been discontinued?  It is no longer in portage.  Here are the details from the Daily CVS ChangeLog:

 *Quote:*   

> Files modified by dsd at 20:14 
> 
> Note: Removing package from portage
> 
> gentoo-x86/sys-kernel/gs-sources/ChangeLog, 1.52 
> ...

 

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## DaMouse

It appears out of date, what does it actually do?

-DaMouse

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## ambrose_curtis

Quote from a former version of the kernel guide.  I'm  thinking that development-sources might be a good alternative to gs-sources.

 *Quote:*   

> gs-sources
> 
> For users to whom desktop interactive performance comes as a secondary priority to reliability and hardware support, we have the gs-sources. GS stands for Gentoo Stable (creative, aren't we?). This patch set is tuned and tested to provide the best support for the latest hardware and ensures that your mission critical servers will be up when you need them. This kernel doesn't have some of the most aggressive performance tuning patches from the gentoo-sources, but rest assured, the great performance that you know and love from the vanilla kernels are alive and well. Where possible and without compromising stability we add server related performance patches. 

 

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## DaMouse

Perhaps vanilla became more stable.. i'd have to assume gs-dev-sources would come out since 2.6 is unstabilising in favour of distributions stabilising it. But yeah, development-sources should be stable at this moment.

-DaMouse

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## codergeek42

Considering that no new features are being added to 2.4, I think it would be wise to use the 2.6 kernel branch.

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## dsd

gs-sources was maintained by a developer who is currently on leave. unfortunately all the patches were combined up into 1 big patch file so other people attempting to maintain/fix this were having a nightmare.

other than security fixes, this kernel hasnt been touched in a long time. lots of bugs on bugzilla, and we werent exactly sure of its purpose either (hardened-sources is for servers, gentoo-sources is for desktop, whats gs-sources for?). so we decided to remove it.

i'd appreciate it if you could switch to gentoo-dev-sources (2.6). the 2004.3 livecd (at least for x86) will run this kernel, so it would be beneficial for it to get lots of testing (although the deadline is coming up real close now). the other reason is that we are possibly working for 2.6 to be default for 2005.0 installations (gentoo-dev-sources will become gentoo-sources, development-sources becomes vanilla-sources, etc.) so it would be nice to get issues solved plenty in advance of this change.

i should probably add that 2.4 will still be provided, just 2.6 will be default. ebuilds for 2.4 and 2.6 will exist under gentoo-sources, and we'll have some slot-selection technique in place so that if a user chooses 2.4 portage wont always want to upgrade to 2.6.

and please report all issues to https://bugs.gentoo.org so that they get our attention. thanks!

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## keli

just great  :Sad: 

was this announced somewhere?

It sucks, as me for one supposed gentoostable wouldn't just wanish in a puff of smoke ilke this, especially, since you used to reccomend it for server use.

Is there some place with any comparison between different kernel-sources? And what should my upgrade path be now, and how will I know that it won't brake anything serious? [I have gs-sources on at least a couple of production servers. according to your reccomendation. S**T. ]

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## dsd

i dont think the "s" has stood for stable in quite a long time. gs-sources basically became the testing ground for gentoo-sources. also, hardened-sources has generally always been our recommendation for server systems.

to be lazy and link to a post i wrote on gentoo-server :

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.server/1241

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## keli

Thanks for your reply. Also, reading through the gmane thread cleared things up too.

 As for where did I get the idea of gs beeing the stable, for-server version - see the quote in the post of ambrose_curtis. I've just read the same docs.  :Smile:  admittedly, a long time ago  :Wink: 

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## Unicorn42

 *dsd wrote:*   

> i dont think the "s" has stood for stable in quite a long time. gs-sources basically became the testing ground for gentoo-sources. also, hardened-sources has generally always been our recommendation for server systems.

 

By "always" , I assume you mean "since March 2004 at the earliest". Because I built several servers then and the kernel guide and other misc documentation claimed that gs-sources was the stable one. The solid one, the one to trust if you were building a production server.  See the quote above. I've been using it ever since. Stable. Never had any of the problems compiling that the developers apparently had. Ahh well....as they said in the other thread, c'est la vie. This happens sometimes to good projects; a simple fact of life. But that's not why I'm motivated to yelp about this.

It vanished.  No warning, just poof.  The standard issue "emerge sync ; emerge -puv world" doesn't give you a clue that anything's amiss...quite the opposite, it gives the reassuring feeling that "thank-god-I-don't-have-to-compile-a-new-kernel-today".

It was only after the fact that it was mentioned, in passing, in some other list that doesn't even show up when you google for "gentoo gs-sources remove OR removed". Not even here on Gentoo Forums!

I sync and check for updates weekly. I check the Gentoo website news weekly. I subscribe to, and read, the Gentoo Newsletter. No mention anywhere. Nothing in a changelog that I could find...anywhere....it was like it never existed to begin with. All references to gs-sources in the documentation vanished as well.  And THAT burns the most....after searching for a while, I did come across a recent bug report requesting that a reference to it be removed....WTF???  Would have killed anyone to put in a note saying something like "gs-sources has bitrotted to hell and will be removed as of 2004.3"???  Was it too much bother to get it in the gentoo news....listed as maybe CRITICAL???

And isn't this what the whole concept of package.mask is for? To block packages that are hopelessly broken?  At least when it vanished, I could still do qpkg -is  and emerge --searches to give me some kind of clue.  A changelog maybe? 

I have an idea...and it'll make portage a lot simpler!  Why bother with putting "deprecated" in old profiles that are pending being unsupported so people have a clue that they need to get away from it?  Just delete the thing one day.  Heck, that'd actually be even better than the gs-sources thing, since at least the failure of emerge and the dangling make.profile symlink would give you a clue something was up.  And since you said that gs-sources had become a "testing ground" (while the documentation still claimed it was the rock-solid one...and, hmmm, maybe that's why it became worthless after _pre7), maybe your next trick will be to make gentoo-sources a testing ground for the future 2.8 kernels. Make sure the Kernel Guide continues to assure everyone that it's the best general-purpose choice. You'd get a lot of excellent production testing, at the very least!  What do you think?

I seriously urge you to ensure that something is put back in the Kernel Guide mentioning that gs-sources, while once a great thing, has gotten all crufty and is therefore no longer available...with your suggestions on which to switch to. Bonus points for one of the Gentoo-style here's-the-step-by-step procedure to switch cleanly pages.  And get it in the gentoo news and the newsletter. You have no idea how many sysadmins believed that "it's the most solid one we have" line and, since it gave us no problems for months (Yes, I saw the bug reports, but I've had no problems on several heavily loaded servers running 2.4.25_pre6 to 2.4.25_pre7_r7). And since there's no news unless you follow these forums and no hints when you look for updates automatically....most of 'em are probably still in the dark. Please.

And I know the tone of this message too accurately displays my annoyance here, so I probably ought to mention that I do really respect you guys and really appreciate your work here on Gentoo. I believe Gentoo to be the best distro out there, for servers and workstations both, and that wouldn't be true if it weren't for your work. But even great people make mistakes, and arbitrarially disappearing a kernel from portage one night with no warning or other notification just because one of you thought it was stinking up the place too much was boneheaded and lame.

And if there really is no good way to handle such situations, maybe we should put in a enhancement request. Like how emerge lights things up in red when something's blocking something else...triggered by maybe an ebuild showing up with 'deprecated' as the version string so that a suitable warning can be displayed so that the sysadmin knows, using her normal procedures, exactly what she's in for if she wants to stay with maintained software.

[/b]

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## keli

wow. couldn't have said it better. I second that, only unfortunately I wasn't in a position to say so, as I'm not a frequent reader of GWN and things like that, so I just supposed I was the only one left off the train  :Smile: 

so - we're all a bit pissed for this, we DO understand if it has to go, it has to go, we DO appreciate and love Gentoo for what it is (otherwise), but we would have expected some notification of the whole thing ...  :Smile: 

[having just said all this, I do feel like a MeeToo  :Embarassed:   :Very Happy:  ]

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## dsd

Thanks for the decent feedback. I do admit that I perhaps glossed over some points that you mention without enough consideration. With the bugs we had open, emails sent to me, feedback on the forums, and my problems when trying to test it, I really didn't think it was in use by any more than a small minority of people. I was suprised, after removal, of the feedback from people who were running it and happy with it (despite it being quite heavily outdated). I agree that the removal procedure should have been better here.

On the other hand, we had recently also removed gaming-sources from portage, as it was broken in the same way (or so it appeared). Nobody had really seemed to notice that one, but the followup of gs-sources has been a little different.

Part of the issue here existed in the lack of resources and developers in the kernel team (i.e. why the documentation didn't really give good advice either). For most of this year, it has been slow moving. But I feel we are much more in shape more recently (notably, I joined up  :Wink: ) although I do have a heart attack when I see the amount of packages under sys-kernel. I'm also happy to say that communication over the whole project has improved considerably since the NFP gentoo foundation was formed.

I've taken your suggestions into consideration (well, the sensible ones that werent just trying to make a point) and will be acting on them - I'll get something into next weeks newsletter and a page up somewhere.

I'd like to point out, that in more usual situations, I do put a lot of effort into getting a migration message across. For example, see the work I put into getting users to switch from an ugly binary nvidia network driver to the open source one : gwn, info page, bugzilla entry, plus some comments made on these forums, the gentoo-user mailing list, and some information messages printed in the previously-existing nforce-net ebuild. If (at the time) we had a better impression of the gs-sources situation, we would have put similar amounts of effort into detailing this.

When you are a developer, it is sometimes easy to skim over seemingly-obvious points like the ones you describe. It's really useful to get feedback like this, and other developers that I've spoken to also wish they got more feedback from users. I'd love to get more email feedback, even if people are just saying that things are working well or that something we/they changed made a real difference for them. For example, I'm sure we have users switching from 2.4 kernels to the gentoo-dev-sources 2.6 kernel (which I maintain). I'd love to have more feedback on how that process went (even if perfectly smooth) from people that perhaps don't have as much knowledge about the different trees as I do. Infact that particular case would be really useful, since we're hoping to get all users (on x86, maybe other archs too) to migrate to 2.6 when 2005.0 comes out. All developers can be reached by their username on the developer list followed by "@gentoo.org".

For anyone else reading this, Unicorn42s post is pretty much how feedback should be written - constructive, while still making a point clearly. Thanks again.  :Smile: 

(next time, email me as well  :Wink: )

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## mach.82

All of the servers that I have put together for the past *two* years are indeed using the gs-sources kernel running 2.4.25_pre6 to 2.4.25_pre7-gss-r11, as recommended by www.gentoo.org. Perhaps now that gs-sources is no longer available. Could someone, preferably in the developers circle, suggest an alternative stable 2.4 kernel source?

Please note that many of us installing servers want *stability* and not bleeding edge technology, at least on the server side. 

All of my servers are running appache2 and postfix+MySQl+amavis-new, squirrelmail, etc. for small companies varying in sizes between 20 to 75 employees.

After suggesting an alternative kernel source, I would be grateful if someone could write an HowTo for us mortals to upgrade gs-sources to the new *stable* kernel. Please remember, many of these production servers, come hell and high water, must be up and running 24/7. Alternatively, would one of your gentle developers please FedEx me a rope suitable for hanging.

Cheers!

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## dsd

you should read the announcement that went up today, it includes everything that you asked for except the rope  :Wink: 

http://www.gentoo.org/news/20041113-kernels.xml

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