Re: Why are new package versions depending on libc6 in unstable?
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 11:04:39PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
I don't have any desire to get into a semantic argument about this.
It wasn't an argument, I was pointing out that the comment wasn't really
about whether some bugs exist on i386.
The philosophy behind testing is to get Debian into a state where it has
zero bugs, and to keep it there. If we don't do this, then at release
time, we get huge long lists of bugs we suddenly realise we have to fix,
and spend the next N months working on them while what the distro we built
gets more and more out of date, and we all get more and more frustrated.
Right. And the current system doesn't seem to be helping this. It looks
at the moment that glibc isn't releasable, but we can't release until
it's fixed. (Because a lot of bugs have been fixed in a lot of other
packages, but those fixes can't hit testing until glibc does.) Wouldn't
it be neat if the fate of certain core packages didn't tie up
development for everything else? If we didn't have this sort of
dependency we wouldn't *have* to fix these bugs before we released
sarge. (E.g., if libc was giving us trouble we'd defer that package to
sarge+1.) What we have now is *exactly* the situation you describe, in
which all development is stalled and won't start until glibc is fixed
(at which point everyone will say, "let's release now" and we'll
suddenly discover and have to fix bugs in all the packages that finally
make it into testing.)
Mike Stone
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