Re: Pros and cons of packaging beta-quality? packages in Debian

[Arthur Korn <arthur@korn.ch>]

Hi

Junichi Uekawa schrieb:
> I believe having beta-quality(?) programs as packages in Debian
> to be a good thing, especially because it will make Debian packages to be
> ready for the real release, quickly, and will have a better debian package
> by the time upstream decides to release it. 

I packaged msyslog long before it was reliable enough to be used
in production, and in the process was able to give the
developers feedback on integration and portability issues (it is
being developed under BSD) early in development.

> I am not sure whether experimental is the place for it though.
> Any reasoned opinion on whether such packages should enter unstable,
> or experimental, and why it should be placed in such a location?

Unstable is IMO the right place for such a package, though I
have no idea how to keep them out of testing. Putting such
packages into experimental seems reasonable too, but only if the
package can't be relied on at all (which wasn't the case for
msyslog, it is based on OpenBSDs syslogd and thus basic logging
worked quite well from the beginning).

ciao, 2ri
-- 
No, I'm not going to explain it.  If you can't figure it out, you didn't
want to know anyway...  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <1991Aug7.180856.2854@netlabs.com>