Re: glibc 2.1 and compatibility (Was: slink is gone, goals for potato?
On Wed, Mar 03, 1999 at 09:24:25AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> And the packages which are compiled on potat will not run on slink or hamm.
>
> This is a serious problem for Debian :
The best "light-weight" (as in, not sucking developer time) solution to this
(legitimate) problem seems obvious.
I maintain stable Debian systems. When I need a newer version of a package,
I first look at the .deb's in unstable. If they require newer libraries
than I have on the stable system, I think, "Great! unstable is moving
forward", and give up on using the .deb's. Instead, I download the three
source files from unstable and build them with dpkg-source and debin/rules.
Voila, new versions of applications depending on stable libraries.
I bet developers do this all the time. An obvious next step is to make
these .deb's available, as-is, to people without the resources or savvy to
recompile.
The proposal:
Debian can provide a useful service by adding new, unsupported
mini-distributions (one per stable dist) for packages from unstable compiled
against (past and present) stable systems. It would exist merely as a
courtesy to users, and developers would be under no pressure to contribute
to it. unstable would remain the focus of development.
The guidelines for uploading to this mini-dist are simple: don't upgrade
"system-level" packages (libraries, low-level utilities, standard shell
commands), and only add packages that are reasonably expected to work (have
lived in unstable for a bit without problems). Both of these criteria
require judgements, but in practice the answers are usually obvious, and we
can err on the side of caution.
The distribution would be clearly labeled as unsupported, available only as
a courtesy to users. However, it should be available in the same way as
other distributions. (I don't know what to call it--perhaps
hamm-unsupported-updates?)
I said this is light-weight. I really mean it--developers should be free to
ignore the new dists completely. However, inevitable it will take some
energies away from unstable, so I understand if people don't want to do it.
I do hope to convince you that it's the only solution to the "Debian is
obsolete" gripe that should be considered at the current time. It also has
the feature that, if successful, the project could scale up gradually.
And I think users would appreciate it greatly.
Andrew
(Stephane, please configure your mailer not to send such long lines.)
--
In general NT is what you get if you could do some portions of Unix all over
again, and then managed to get it all terribly wrong.
- Maury Markowitz <maury@remove_this.istar.ca>
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