Re: task-kde broken
"David A. Greene" <greened@eecs.umich.edu> wrote:
>On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, David Starner wrote:
>> Oh my god! It's been in incoming for 24 hours! Look, times in incoming
>> are quanta measured in days. Depending on how busy the ftp masters are,
>> it may take as much as a couple weeks or more. There's nothing the
>> maintainer or anyone else can do about it but wait.
>
>Look. I don't need this from you. I understand the FTP maintainers
>aren't at my beck and call. But the KDE maintainer uploaded some
>new KDE packages NOT linked to liblcms and those went through
>just fine to unstable. I am still waiting for liblcms. That
>doesn't make any sense to me. Why did packages sent LATER to
>incoming arrive EARLIER?
OK, to explain this in a little more detail [1]:
Packages uploaded to incoming are processed in a largely automatic way,
because otherwise the FTPmasters don't get to have a life. Thus, easy
packages - those which pass sanity checks and already have earlier
versions in the archive, say - get in when the automatic installer run
next happens. Task packages that already exist are usually "easy" by
this definition, so those (like task-x-window-system-core-2.0) get
installed straight away.
However, the FTP maintainers have to look at each new package and
process it specially. It has to be added to the "override file" - the
master list of sections and priorities for each package - and it has to
be checked for things like whether it has an appropriate licence. So
packages in incoming don't get processed in first-in-first-out order.
Most people who've run unstable for any length of time have got used to
the fact that sometimes you have to wait for some dependencies to turn
up before you can install a package. It shouldn't be a big deal, because
the stable distribution is there for people who are bothered by this
kind of thing, or indeed the experimental testing distribution
(http://auric.debian.org/~ajt/). For other people, it can even be useful
to have packages turn up early, because even if you can't install them
you can use 'apt-get source'.
[1] From a not-yet-developer, and certainly non-FTP-maintainer, so there
may be some inaccuracies.
>To my previous question, I received the reply, "it's in incoming."
>I've asked how to get it from incoming, but received little to
>no reply. I've RTFM'd, but can't find the info.
For people using unstable, the Developers' Reference is a useful
document to read. It doesn't explicitly mention this, but it does give
you a general overview of the way things work. Also, checking mailing
list archives is always a good idea; incoming is mentioned often.
If you don't find the documentation up to scratch, then, when you do
find out the solution, send patches! Remember, the people who wrote the
documentation are usually used to the system, and so may forget things
that seem obvious to them. If nobody ever sends patches, then the
situation is unlikely to improve.
>> If you can't handle unstable, don't live on unstable.
>
>Yes, that's right. Because bug reports aren't wanted, I guess.
It was put slightly harshly, but the point is there. Bug reports are
generally a Good Thing, and are crucial to the quality of the
distribution. However, bug reports that are filed out of fundamental
misunderstandings of the way things work in unstable just take up
developers' time, as do bug reports to package maintainers about things
that they can't fix and that will be fixed anyway in a relatively short
period of time. If you're using unstable, you *have* to be aware that
things sometimes break, and when you expect it to be a stable, working
system and are angry at volunteers when a few packages are broken for
only a day or two, the response is naturally going to be a little along
the lines of "well, go back to stable, then".
Keep reading debian-devel, and perhaps look back through the Kernel
Cousin summaries of the list at <URL:http://kt.linuxcare.com/debian/>,
and you should get a better feel for how things work.
Regards,
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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