Re: Gnome to be removed from debian?

[Stephen Crowley <crow@debian.org>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 1999 at 01:42:01PM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > I'm sorry but it is simply not acceptable to gripe about bugs in alpha
> > software. Especially *free* alpha software. Reporting them is fine,
> > griping is not.
> > 
> > Even though I'm quite sure you're right that this has been broken in some
> > of the tarballs.
> 
> Why exactly are we distributing what amounts to weekly snapshots in the
> main distribution? Maybe you guys should lobby for a snapshots dist for
> truely unstable stuff like this.
> 
> It is really lame to have a working X app, upgrade to potato and find it
> stops working and there is no fix available because some gnome guy doesn't
> bother with alpha shared library versions.
> 
> I would almost propose that we disallow 'alpha' libraries from entering
> the main distribution, perhaps providing some other venues for them (like
> experimental was supposed to be). If the upstream author cannot be
> bothered to keep the soname rational then I don't see why we should bother
> to include it in our primary distribution.
> 
> That said, if amongst the gnome packagers they come up with a
> forwards/backwards compatible set of libraries and applications from a
> given snapshot then that as a whole could migrate over into potato. If
> necessary the gnome packagers would tweak sonames to achieve this (it is
> after all alpha software)

I see no reason why we would need to do this, as someone said earlier it
would be possible to avoid the problem with versioned depends. Besides, it's
called unstable for a reason, brokenness is a common thing. The main problem
I see here is package maintainers not recompiling packages when new libs
come out.

/-----------------------------------------------------------\
|Stephen Crowley      stephenc@wf.net, crow@debian.org      |
|Debian GNU/Linux     http://www.debian.org                 |
|GPG Key              http://va.debain.org/~crow/public.key |
\--- 8A8B 3B82 6EA7 CF4E 01A5  5B21 B378 981D D2E1 0D85 ----/