Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 9:19 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by torquay
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

You're totally correct. Though individual maintainers can still support their old modules in case they wish. We highly encourage bugfixes to happen in latest releases though. And IMO it makes sense: 3.14 is the continued development effort based on 3.12. Sometimes a 3.14 version is not much more than 3.12 + new translations, called 3.14 for simplicity sake.

Regarding this proposal: Lennart mentioned somewhere else that he only expects the bare minimum of fixes to go in. Security fixes and that's it. That's so minimal that I think it is something GNOME could take up.

We still run into and rely on all the other points you made. Maybe solution is indeed to rely on LTS distributions. Have two runtimes: LTS based one, and a shorter supported one.

I do see the usefulness of this though: When GNOME is released anyone in any distribution can immediately make use of GNOME. That's a question we get fairly often. How to use latest GNOME in their current distribution. There's a lot of practicalities though; GNOME often relies on newer versions of lower level stuff (e.g. Wayland).

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 11:05 UTC (Tue) by warmcat (guest, #26416) [Link]

Security assurance becomes a bit fuzzy like that.

Signed distro packages say "something"... maybe not much if some source packages came from sourceforge or somebody's USB stick or whatever, but something. People have rallied around distro security policy as their starting point for their system being clean, rightly or wrongly.

If Gnome put out a sort of layer of stuff I can install and run as a unit, that does sound useful, however they might sign the image but the process that sourced and created the contents is kind of opaque and unrelated to how a distro functions.

Obviously it differs but at heart this is not a million miles from "some kind of filesystem apk", and Android has to expect they are malicious, control their system access with an enforced manifest you can inspect before installation, etc. Something like that also seems to be needed here.