Re: Suggestion: Skip Slink!
On Wed, Jan 06, 1999 at 03:12:47PM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> For Red Hat, it would be possible to make RH5.1 for i386 and sparc stable at
> the same time, simply by ordering the right number of employees to work on
> each port. They favour i386 for purely profit and marketing reasons,
> because i386 is more popular. Don't jump on me for saying that. It's true.
Of course, that is correct.
> Debian doesn't do things for public popularity, or for profit. But we also
> don't have a management team. You can't order i386 developers to work on
> the sparc version, and as a side-effect of i386 being popular, there are a
> lot more i386 developers than sparc developers. Therefore i386 gets newer
> packages and faster bugfixes, and that's the way it is.
I'm not saying that i386 developers ought to be ordered to work on Sparc.
To do so would be silly. I'm also not saying that there is necessarily a
problem with most packages showing up first on the i386 distribution; this
effects unstable only, no big deal there. Porters will get around to it
eventually.
What I am complaining about is that there are certain things that are either
being done or suggested that relegate other ports to a second-class status.
> You can, of course, still release the i386 and sparc ports at the same time,
> but that's because i386 is later, not because sparc is earlier. That's a
> failure, not an improvement. I can see absolutely no advantage in such a
> delay.
It's not the Sparc's fault that it is not truly frozen yet.
Further, at freeze time, all ports "should" be at the same spot anyway, or
very nearly so.
It's when people start suggesting that we don't release one port simply
because its FTP directory was not frozen at the same time as i386, and
therefore hasn't had a chance to catch up yet, that really gets on my
nerves.
--
John Goerzen Linux, Unix consulting & programming jgoerzen@complete.org |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade) www.debian.org |
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