Am 21.11.2012 09:48, schrieb Jon Dowland:
Forgive my ignorance there, but much of that talk was kind of strange to me. As, I already run MATE for many months now on at least 5 different boxes, with debian packages kindly provided by upstream. I know they may not be 100% perfect but they do the job nicely. I've seen a fair amount of strange bugs and strange attitudes from people in Debian, a lot of complaints about maintainers and their packages and compared to that I could not think how those well-working packages could make an impact there. About quality of code... I guess one could argue there for hours how bad something is. Man, if I think about all those complaints I have heard over the years, it must be a wonder that something like Debian even works! :D But it does, so do the packages. Even if not perfect, they do the job. So I ignorantly thought even if not perfect, they could be made perfect (as in "good enough") in a matter of days or at least one or two weeks. And then there is LMDE (Linuxmint Debian Edition), which provides packages as well. LMDE is more than less a snapshot of Debian testing at a given time. Combine all of that and you might end up thinking "well, they just overdraw the whole issue". And many of us agree on that for example ubuntu is of less quality. It may be true or not. I have seen some weird issues in ubuntu (from the outside, I don't run any box with it) and I have some political issues with them, so I quietly agree with that attitude. But translate that to linuxmint and you might have another good explanation why "those folks" may overdraw the whole issue... big-scale. :)On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 04:03:33AM +0100, Michael Schmitt wrote:So much for the general rules... but exceptions ARE possible! And I just try to make a case here about how important it might be!IF you had a set of MATE packages all ready to go and you were asking for a freeze exception for them, then the release team would be in a position to consider an exception. But there are no such packages. We're arguing hypotheticals (as we often do on -devel, to my eternal dismay). There's still a lot of work to do in order to get MATE ready for Debian.
So, to sum it up, I ignorantly thought packages that would fit well enough into Debian would not be as far away as everybody else thinks. I may still think that to a certain degree, but it doesn't matter. I agree with the overall decision. Mainly because of other reasons but that doesn't change a thing here.
Anyway, I used the term "ignorant" for a reason there. And I don't want that others follow the urge to get rid of my "ignorance" (read: help me understand the packages issue better), especially not here, wasting the time of maybe some others. And maybe it would be better to let that issue remain in clouds anyway... just thinking. :p
I'm sorry, it's simply too late for wheezy. The last thing we want to do is delay the release at this point. Long drawn out freezes are horrendously demoralising for everyone. It's important we get wheezy out in a timely fashion.
Agreed! regards Michael