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Re: Developer Behavior



On Tuesday 09 January 2001 03:17, Vince Mulhollon wrote:
> 5) A Debian Developer will never knowingly run a production server on
> "unstable" and will never encourage a non-developer to run "unstable".

I understand that people don't like being told what to do and agree that it 
isn't the place of Debian policy to tell us what to do when we aren't doing 
strictly Debian development work).
But I think that there is some merit to having discouragement towards running 
unstable on production machines.  I've been getting flamed immensely recently 
about my lilo package that over-wrote lilo.conf incorrectly.  Even though:
1)  This situation does not stop a running machine from working, it will only 
stop it from booting.
2)  I am working on this as fast as possible given the constraints of 
available time, dpkg issues, and not wanting to release a second non-perfect 
package!
3)  I have on several occasions recently had worse things happen to me as a 
result of running unstable, there have been several occasions when running 
machines have been rendered unusable because of bugs in packages (it became 
impossible to login).  In these occasions I have not felt it necessary to 
flame the maintainers.

The people who flame the developers contribute nothing.  When they report 
bugs that exist they invariably do so after more polite people have already 
reported them and the developer has started work.  Then work has to be 
interrupted to spend time fighting off flames.

I don't think that unstable should be limited to Debian developers, but I 
think that it should be restricted to discourage people who aren't reading 
debian-devel.  What if we setup the servers to use a different random 
password every month that was only announced on debian-devel?

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