On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 11:09:25PM -0400, Christopher W. Curtis wrote: > However, I > will take exception to your statement that unstable is necessarily a > venue for testing. I would think that that is what 'testing' is for. Kind-of. The distinction is that first pass "is this completely screwed?" testing needs to be done while the package is in unstable (ideally before the package is uploaded, but experience shows we're just not able to achieve that), whereas more regular "hey, this feature doesn't work as documented" or "hey, this obscure combination of things doesn't work as it should" testing is meant to be done while the package is in the testing distro. Basically, the root causes of the delays that would be avoided by building against testing are broken packages that need to be fixed. Fixing them isn't busy-work, or make work, it's useful and needs to be done in its own right. By contrast, I'm fairly confident that building against testing would likewise introduce a bunch of delays (probably fewer), but that working around them would involve introducing temporary hacks that need to be taken out later (like rebuilding against an old version of the library until the new version gets promoted, then rebuilding again, at its simplest). I'd rather just accept that testing isn't as useful as it could be, than force developers to do more work than they'd otherwise have to do. Joey Hess's upload frequency is still the major outstanding bug on that score. :( 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. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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