Hi there, after cursing my head off a few times when trying to help with debugging the unstable dist due to really nasty problems with rather basic packages like X or libstdc++ I'd like to make two proposals: + Firstly, shouldn't we assign, lets say five volunteers to every maintainer of a base package (including X for that matter) to make sure those vital packages have been run sucessfully on at least five different (preferrably librarywise non-tweaked) systems before upload to master ? I gained the impression that the systems used by core package developers are for obvious reasons not quite what one would expect from vanilla dpkg/apt/dselect upgrades, which might explain how the recent catastrophies could happen. I know X is undergoing restructuring and there's a lot of code turnover in glibc, but I still don't understand how packages working on the developer's system can fail so badly on others unless we have a conceptual mistake in the project here... + Secondly we need a crash-proof upgrading process. For instance we would need a dpkg option 'Install with crash recovery' which repacks a package to be upgraded and stores it for automatic downgrading to a working state if the upgrade causes severe trouble... This would be a rather lengthy process for large upgrades when the number of packages is large and also takes up substantial space but I can't think of a better approach at the moment. Much too often my systems were really screwed up after upgrading, as the working .deb's of lower version number disappeared from all mirrors out there. I seem to remember repacking is already implemented so perhaps we should just write a HOWTO on safely using the unstable distribution for Dev Corner. Regards, -- /(__ __|\ Lars Steinke, Research Student @ ( \/ __)_ www.fmf.uni-freiburg.de, Germany ) (_____ / for PGP PKey and WWW-Page finger /___________/ steinke@mibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de
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