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Re: so what? Re: Debian development modem



On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 03:35:19PM +0200, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen wrote:
> > It's MUCH better IMO to have PACKAGES be stable and unstable.  After a
> > period of time (at least partially on the urgency of the package--not the
> > priority) if there are no outstanding grave/critical bugs, the package can
> > be moved into stable dist..
> 
> I like.  That will mean we can have a "current" Debian all the time.

Current enough at least.  And if apt allows you to have the package list for
unstable but NOT automagically upgrade to unstable packages lest you tell it
to, then you'd be all set.


> For greater changes in system policy, however (as with moving to libc6) 
> this can be more of a challenge. (However, I might be wrong)

Not so much as it sounds.  Upgrading to hamm today is not a simple task and
dselect is drain bamaged to the extreme with telling dpkg how to install
packages to make the upgrade work and apt isn't quite ready for general use
I think (though I've had NO PROBLEMS with it myself and most probably
wouldn't either) and isn't part of hamm.

However, I am thinking more slink or post-slink.  By then we should have
something more substantial for apt.

Adding libc6 to bo is EASY.  I did this the day after I installed from my
1.3.1r6 CD and I had NO EXPERIENCE with Linux before that really.  Some very
basic ksh experience on an isp shell, but I couldn't even write a shell
script at the time.  What was harder was installing other packages in the
right order and I did screw it up (by letting dselect do it for me) before I
wend and did it by hand.  It killed bash by not having libreadline there and
such.  Since it left much else broken I didn't want to TRY and fix it, so I
just reinstalled, upgraded by hand, and learned how to fix these things in
the future..  (hint:  sash and an extra passwd entry for root is a good
beginning!)

And hamm is backwards compatible with libc5, unlike Redhat 5.  The combined
effect of frequent updates to stable, apt to make those updates work safely,
and debian's backwards compatibility to at least the last version would make
Debian a VERY attractive alternative to Redhat bugginess.

We just gotta watch that things that should NOT move into stable don't till
they're ready to move there.  I'm pretty sure we can do it though.

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