Re: Fixed release dates are hurting quality
So.
On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 01:40:39PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I just noticed how maintainers are NMU'ing packages in large quantities to
> get them somehow in a usable state for the release. The packages get small
> patches so that they are more or less working and can get into testing,
> despite the packages being untouched for a long time in some cases meaning
> there is no guarantee for quality.
I was one of these maintainers.
gridengine has been in Debian since 2008, and the version in Buster
works well. I don't have time to maintain it, but I do use it often, and
some of the work I do for the debconf and FOSDEM video teams relies on
it being available.
It was pointed out to me shortly before the freeze that it was not in
bullseye because of a "FTBFS with gcc-10" bug for which a (rather
trivial) patch was already available. Unfortunately it turned out that
that patch wasn't sufficient, so I had to repeat the pattern one more
time to make it work. The patch is *still* very trivial though.
There is now a gridengine package in Bullseye again, and it works as
well as it did in Buster.
I don't agree with the statement that doing things like this is a bad
idea. Sometimes doing the minimal necessary to make a package work again
so that our future needs will still be served by it is a good idea. I
think that this is one of those times, and I guess that it's the same
for most of the packages uploaded like that.
--
To the thief who stole my anti-depressants: I hope you're happy
-- seen somewhere on the Internet on a photo of a billboard
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