Re: Debian 3.0r1
My dear collegues!
Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
> IMO we should try and do a point release by Sep 1. Of course I'm a little
> biased, I've accumulated a few bugs in the woody version of webmin I'd
> like to fix but owing to the long freeze I'm sure there are some other
> packages which could do with a quick update.
>
> What needs to be done to organize this?
Make the bugs a security problem or move Easter and Christmas to the
same date.
Russell Coker wrote:
> Another thing, I'd like to get SE Linux added in a point release.
More serious:
Come on people. What makes you think that I'm going be more sloopy
with the Woody release, that took us more time than any other release,
and change the policy on revisions of the stable Debian release?
Once a Debian distribution is released as stable, the release is meant
to be stable, except for security and very serious updates. The
outcome is that merely security updates and updates to very serious
(please don't confuse this with the BTS severity ``serious'') problems
will make its way into the stable release through a
point-release/revision. Such problems refer to potential data loss,
uninstallable package or unusable package.
The whole point of having well tested packages, a well tested and
integrated stable distribution, and keeping the stable release as
stable as possible and without too much changes would be moot if
random packages were able to get updated and added.
Updating random packages because of non-serious bugs would make the
entire idea of having a stable and a testing distribution useless.
Please concentrate on unstable and fixing bugs instead, since this
would probably help us release sarge with less hassle and hate in a
six to twelve month timeframe from now on.[1] Supporting people and
our infrastructure with problematic upgrades of important packages
would probably be helpful as well.[2]
The stable distribution is called ``stable'' for a reason and the name
was not choosen randomly from a dictionary. It is meant to stay in a
similar and _stable_ state until it is replaced by the next stable
release. The only exceptions to this rule are fixes to security
problems and fixes to very serious problems (see above).
Buggy packages are rather removed than updated, in order not to
disturb the well tested integrety of the stable distribution.
If you would like to support new packages and packages with lower
priority fixes, please set up[3] a non-official repository of Debian
packages, from which users can fetch additional or updated packages.
Russell Coker wrote:
> I believe that the principle of only fixing security bugs in point releases
> is best upheld by allowing new packages that provide extra security features
> to be added.
Nice try Russell, but as far as I know, the SE Linux kernel is neither
the default kernel on a Debian system nor do all regular Debian
packages interact with it properly. Hence, with the argument of above
you just tried to lead the user to false assumptions by implying that
including selinux would make the release more secure, while it isn't
even compiled for all 11 architectures. *cough* Do I need to say
more?
Russell Coker wrote:
> It's just some extra packages that you can choose to not install...
That's quite fair. Hence, I choose not to install them in stable. :-)
1. Anthony may disagree, though.
2. As an example, there are rumours about an new perl packages, which
could require a lot of updated packages.
3. Just run the ``apt-ftparchive'' command on the archive and read
it's manpage.
Regards,
Joey
--
Ten years and still binary compatible. -- XFree86
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
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