Re: Release Plans (1999-05-10)
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> It seems to me that since there will always be patches and updates
> to packages
> between releases, and since we have the "proposed" updates, perhaps we could
> add an "updates" area, in addition to the non-free, contrib, and
> main sections.
Yes, and these patches live in the unstable distribution. How do you
know that a patch won't (a) cause some other part of the program to
fall over, or (b) cause some other program to fall over (due to some
unforeseen interaction)? That's why patches and updates only go into
the unstable distribution. (The sole exception to this is security
updates or other critical bugs which are allowed into stable because
of the serious damage the problem might otherwise cause.)
> This would work VERY nicely for users who want to grab the latest patches. A
> good example of why this would be good is the XFree 3.3.2 being released in
> slink, and everyone wanting 3.3.3.
Who's everyone? I'm quite happy with 3.3.2.3a-11 here. But if you
*must* have 3.3.3, then you can either compile it yourself or move to
unstable. But with XFree86 being the huge beast which it is, how do
you know whether 3.3.3 might interact in bad ways with other pieces of
software? That's the purpose of unstable.
> Also, for potato, since it WILL
> be glibc 2.1
> based, I suspect a large number of people would want versions of
> XFree, gnome,
> and other packages without having to upgrade their systems. By setting up an
Should we provide libc5 versions as well for those who are still
running Debian versions pre-2.0? (My department have machines running
1.2 and 1.3 and are now planning to "upgrade" to Red Hat 5.2 :-( .
And they wanted XFree86 3.3.3, so they downloaded it and compiled it
themselves.) I think that it is quite enough work for the developers
to ensure that two versions work as well as possible (stable and
unstable, and even sometimes frozen), without expecting them to work
on a random mix of packages from different versions. GNOME has been
discussed in other mails, but for the other stuff, it seems quite
reasonable to expect those people who are desperate to download the
binaries directly from XFree86's site, for example.
> extension to our current directory structure for updates, we make it
> VERY simple
> for people to add these in. I THINK it might also make it easier to release
> maintenance releases in this manner. Simply have all the updated packages in
> the updates section. If apt and dselect do their jobs, it should grab the
> proper NEWer version of the package.
Yes, it would make it much easier to have interim releases, but the
stability is guaranteed to suffer. And as the stated purpose of
stable is to be just that: stable, it is not reasonable to put routine
upgrades of individual packages in stable. There is a new release of
Debian approximately every six months: those people who cannot wait
that long are welcome to live on the unstable distribution.
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. jdg@debian.org
-*- Finger jdg@master.debian.org for my PGP public key. -*-
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