Re: Release-critical Bugreport for December 19, 1998

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Bart Warmerdam <bartw@xs4all.nl> writes:

> On Sat, Dec 19, 1998 at 12:15:08AM -0600, BugScan reporter wrote:
> > Bug stamp-out list for Dec 19 00:03 (CST)
> > 
> > Total number of release-critical bugs: 69
> 
>   Why are these packages release critical?? I thought only main is release
>   crital and non-free, contrib, non-US etc. are not, since they're not
>   officially part of Debian.
> 
>   Package: acroread (non-free)
>   Package: cmucl-defsystem (non-free)
>   Package: icq-java (contrib)
>   Package: jdk1.1 (non-free)
>   Package: netscape-base-407 (non-free)
>   Package: qt1g (non-free)
>   Package: qt1g-dev (non-free)
>   Package: ssh (non-US)

I asked Wichert to include non-free in the QA process.  Otherwise, we
are going to get blamed when these things get released in a broken
state.  For example, I'm one of those bitten by the jdk bugs (which is
really an update-alternatives bug).

Releasing broken stuff would just look bad.  Non-free is under
dists/frozen after all.  We get judged on this stuff, like it or not.

If they can't be fixed, we'll just remove them from the release.
There's no reason anything outside of the core set of Debian packages
should delay the release.  All the non-free bugs look fairly easy to
fix, fortunately.

If we aren't going to put these through the QA process, then we should
evict non-free entirely from the dists/ portion of the ftp site.  I
personally feel that non-free is a valuable service to the users of
Debian, so I would be sad to see it go.  Some would differ with me on
that point.

Cheers,

 - Jim