Re: 2.2r1 release problems
On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 09:10:00PM -0600, An Thi-Nguyen Le wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 08:35:45AM -0800, Zack Brown typed:
> } Correct me if I'm wrong (please!), but with the release of 2.2r1 and with
> } Slink unsupported, there is currently no uptodate stable version of Debian.
> }
> } I can not see any good reason for having 2.2 systems silently upgrade to
> } 2.2r1. Especially since the new version is actually known to be somewhat
> } broken.
>
> Where, exactly, is the new version "somewhat broken"? I just did a
> 2.2r1 install and several upgrade on 2.2r0 systems today. Every
> machine seems pretty happy. Plus I think of r<n> as "Revision n", not
> "New Version n"; a few upgraded packages, a very few new packages,
> here and there.
When I first noticed all the upgraded packages, I got on #debian-devel
and asked about it. Wichert explained the new version, and also about the
breakage. I have no first-hand experience of it, since I didn't upgrade once
I heard what had happened.
If I sound calm, it is a thin veneer, or else it is the calm of someone who is
in shock. I simply cannot understand how this decision was made. Nor can the
people I know who maintain production servers and like to keep up with all the
latest fixes.
If the only reply to my post is going to be, "where exactly is the new version
broken?", then I would guess there will be a lot of new Red Hat users in the
near future. Making this kind of change to a stable release, i.e. replacing it
with an unstable release, is just very disturbing. I might be less weirded out
if I knew that some clear guidelines were followed for the type of changes made
to create 2.2r1. Were they only bug fixes and security updates? Somehow that's
not my impression, and believe me, I would love to be corrected on that. But
were any guidelines followed at all? Or did people just say, "hey! it would be
cool to upgrade these particular packages. We promise to be careful..."
I'd like to reiterate that I have no problem with creating 2.2r1. What I
object to is that 2.2r1 was made a silent upgrade to 2.2. As far as I
can see, this puts earth in the situation of having no stable version of
Debian. None. And it throws into question the validity of all future updates
as well. Unless some sort of policy is determined for the types of changes
allowed into the stable tree, no one will be able to trust Stable to the
extent that they did before. So I do think that r1 should have been given
its own tree, and users forced to modify their /etc/apt/sources.list files
in order to get the upgrade.
I'd also suggest that an official announcement be made, to the effect that
there was a mistake, it won't be repeated, and people can count on only
such-and-such types of changes (bug fixes and security updates, I'd hope)
to the stable tree in the future.
Zack
>
>
> --
> An Thi-Nguyen Le
> |Alone, adj.:
> | In bad company.
> | -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
>
>
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--
--
Zack Brown, Linuxcare, Inc.
tel: 1-415-354-4878x284, fax: 1-415-701-7457
zbrown@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
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