Re: Unsupported Debian [was: Re: [New maintainer] Working for De
On Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 11:00:25AM +0200, Paul Seelig wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Alex Shnitman wrote:
>
> > I second the idea of a semi-stable distribution. This is a great
> > solution for potato-packages-needed-for-slink such as X, new Gnome and
> > so on.
> >
> Yes, please! This is urgently needed!
>
> My number one frustrations with Debian is that it seems to forget about
> the users. People who need to run a Debian "stable" and who on the other
> hand want to run more current package versions than the by now (almost)
> ancient ones offered within "stable", but who definitely can't afford the
> inherent risk connected with a switch to "unstable" do actually exist.
> What i'm missing *most* from Debian is a continous update of the released
> "stable" tree with more current versions of various packages (e.g. i
> really do miss the most recent teTeX-1.0x for "stable").
This is a difficult problem, because it generally requires developers to have
multiple boxes, because packages compiled on potato don't work on slink.
It will get better when you can do apt-get -b source in stable, but apt-get
source needs a few more features before this is really all there for this
sort of use (ie, an option to install after the build, to automatically
check some packages for updated versions, etc.). The bigger problem, though,
is that dpkg-buildpackage doesn't always work -- though the recent proposal
regarding source dependencies may help with this as well. Regardless,
this seems a much more useful area to work on than on trying to create a
new semi-stable archive that most developers can't/won't create packages for.
-- Nathaniel
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