On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 05:14:23PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> Two good examples:
> 1. debian-user is full of bugs about realplayer not
> upgrading; this was fixed in 8.0.2, but it's not made it into testing
> yet, and the buggy version did, before the bug was even discovered. So
> people will continue to hit this bug for a while yet.
realplayer 8.0.2 was uploaded with urgency medium three days ago; if it'd
been uploaded with urgency high it'd have gone in today (or yesterday?).
This could imply either that whatever realplayer 8.0.1's bugs were is
enough reason for a high urgency upload, so maybe there's a general
guideline here? Alternatively, it could imply that there should be some
way for people to raise the urgency of an upload after the fact. Or it
could be something else.
The problem in 8.0.1 seems reasonably good evidence for not shortening
the period a package has to stay available before it's ready for testing
though.
> 2. I get at least 2 bugs a day now about bugs in debconf 0.2.80.17. Perl
> 5.6 makes it spew all kinds of crap that it didn't used to, plus it
> has sagans and sagans of known, and now fixed bugs -- it's a year old
> after all. My best efforts to get a new version into testing were
> foiled by an incompatable change to apt, so it will be weeks from now
> until this bug barrage ends, at the least.
debconf is so out of date because it's had hard dependencies on unstable
software ever since testing has existed. Initially it depended on
perl-5.6, which has only recently made it into a releasable form; then it
depended on apt, although I'm not sure this has ever been a problem; and
since we've had a fixed perl available and a rebuilt debconf, debconf's
been updated every other day or so, so hasn't had enough testing for
the scripts to be game to include it.
If debconf hadn't switched to perl 5.6 until it was in testing, I don't
think there'd have been a problem.
I'm not sure there are any other alternatives that don't have their
own problems (shortening how long it takes debconf to get into testing
increases the probabability of undetected problems like the realplayer
bug; demanding joeyh upload less frequently on a regular basis isn't
really convenient).
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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