Re: FTP arrangement
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 95 12:03 BST
From: Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk>
> I want to do this because development of 0.93 is stopping with
> Release 6. Packages that fix bugs will be merged into 0.93 for a
> Release 7 sometime in October, and that will probably be that for
> 0.93.
I'm confused. I thought we had an incrementally upgradeable system ?
What is the purpose of the extra directory ?
We do.
A common complaint from our users has been that the distribution is a
constantly moving and shifting target. I'm trying to think about how
we can remedy this problem.
I'm not saying that development of a.out packages should stop--I'm
saying that we should think about stability post-0.93 more than we
have been. Part of increasing stability is to be more selective
in what packages we add and change that are already proven to work.
Or are you saying that we are now not allowing any further development
of non-ELF stuff ? That would be a disaster. We need to keep fixing
bugs and enhancing the a.out, and given our nice source-base
development approach we can easly produce an ELF version of packages
on demand.
No, I'm not saying this at all. I'm saying that fairly soon our
primary emphasis (from a development point of view) will be the ELF
distribution. We'll still update the a.out distribution, of course,
but it'll become less and less of a priority from a development point
of view. The most important aspect of having the a.out distribution
will be its stability. It'll be the primary choice of users who need
a stable distribution for a long time. The users who want to live on
the "bleeding edge" will be using the ELF distribution the minute we
start working on it.
I'm very very confused. Perhaps some rationale for all of this would
be helpful. Unfortunately that would mean launching into an extended
discussion 12 hours after we should have released, which seems like a
bad idea to me ...
Yes, I'd like to postpone this decision for that reason. It isn't
mission critical at the moment, but it will be fairly soon, as soon
as we start thinking about how to proceed with the ELF distribution.
I have, however, gone ahead and made the changes at ftp.debian.org.
We're going to need to separate a.out and ELF fairly soon, anyway, so
it might as well be done now. We can discuss what our policy will be
wrt making and updating releases after we make this one.
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