Re: Care of your packages Was: Accepted dh-ocaml 0.4.1~bpo50+1 (source all)

[Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at>]

* Andres Salomon <dilinger@queued.net> [2010-02-01 16:45:25 CET]:
> On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 10:53:12 +0100
> Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at> wrote:
> >  Additional to the example that Jan used I want to throw in pidgin.
> > Pidgin got the video support disabled in the backport because of the
> > dependencies not available in lenny and would be too much to bear.
> > This got noted down in the changelog for users to see.
> 
> What's the point of ensuring that the package has made its way into
> testing if you're going to go ahead and modify the package compilation
> in such a way?

 To get the fixes into backports that make it work again for ICQ and MSN
protocol changes. Video chat support is though something completely new
and its heavy library requirements do make this a valid point.
Additionally, I haven't heard any request for having video support in
(and would have explained the issue that it would require - like almost
the whole gstreamer stack it seems, that's where I gave up investigating
further) but still have the benefits of the updated version in other
respects nevertheless.

> >  as-needed appears when there indeed are security issues and bug fixes
> > around. What one should *not* do though is to stay quite in case of
> > such issues and just pretend that it isn't there. If one has troubles
> > with updating a backport for such issues please raise your voice so
> > you can get helped. There's nothing worse than sitting around and
> > hoping noone will notice the issues.
> 
> What issues, exactly?  The issue of, "gee, the current version of $foo
> in lenny-backports satisfies my needs perfectly, what's the point of
> updating to the version in squeeze?" (which may cause random other
> packages to be uninstallable, etc).

 Issues like security bugs or many other bug fixes that people would
like to have in there. You know, actually that's often a big part of the
reason people do release updates to their software. If it may cause
random other packages to be uninstallable then that's an issue that
should be taken in consideration. Yet this happened very rarely, to be
honest. By milestones far less than that there are bug fixes included
in the updated packages that nag at least some few people badly, even if
they aren't you yourself.

 Thanks,
Rhonda