Once again a chorus of complaints has arisen about the absence of Debian packages for the newest upstream version of XFree86. Let me make a public announcement on the subject. A number of people expressed a desire to create some .debs for XFree86 3.3.3.1. I do not want to discourage anybody from doing this (it would greatly reduce the amount of harassment I get, especially on IRC), but please, please try to understand that I have to make the following caveats: * Please, PLEASE, release to project/experimental (or put them on a webpage), and loudly inform users of the packages that they should *NOT* use the Debian Bug Tracking System with regard to these packages. I simply do not have the resources to keep up with more than one version of X at a time, and maintaining my rather large percentage of the open bug reports in Debian is hard enough without taking version skew into account. If the BTS had some nifty feature like user-definable flags that I could set on a per-bug basis, I could probably handle it. But it doesn't. * Please understand that I will probably package 3.3.3.1 from scratch myself, and likely completely disregard any other packagings of it when I do so. It's going to be enough of a headache rewriting the rules file and re-merging all of the existing Debian patches (excluding the ones already taken care of upstream) without having to sync up with yet another set of changes. * Anyone who *does* encounter any remarkable issues with respect to the packaging procedure itself, please mail branden@debian.org about it. If you find anything surprising or potentially painful about the new X, consider showing mercy on me and warning me about it. I am fairly confident that anyone who sits down and carefully tries to Debianize 3.3.3.1, while still preserving any needed existing Debian patches, will understand why I have not yet done so. Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty, but so far the prospect has me quaking in my boots. Nevertheless, if you do and if you succeed, Godspeed to you. I am perfectly willing to put a prominent link in the "News" section of the X Stike Force page to these experimental packages (though I get the feeling that the only people who ever look at the XSF are the kind who'd already know about such packages...*sigh*). Indeed, I'll do everything in my power to direct people to them. Finally, as for why 3.3.3.1 isn't in slink, I'll say it again: slink officially froze on or about October 16th. I know the FTP site took about a month actually implementing the freeze, but that's when my plans became set in stone. The nature of a freeze is such that, the longer it drags on, both the perceived urgency of new upstream versions and the risk of forcing it in goes up. I have not received a mail from Brian White telling me to go ahead with 3.3.3 or 3.3.3.1 in the face of the freeze. In fact, I probably make him nervous with my "deep freeze" X releases (my managing to break the record for longest Debian changelog ever, and doing so during a deep freeze, probably made him uneasy). Anyway, as I understood the slink freeze timetable and conditions, I have only been doing what is required of me as a developer. And why isn't 3.3.3.1 in potato? That's one's easy. I just haven't had time. -- G. Branden Robinson | I am sorry, but what you have mistaken Debian GNU/Linux | for malicious intent is nothing more branden@ecn.purdue.edu | than sheer incompetence! cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | -- J. L. Rizzo II
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