Re: Is Sid for broken stuff? Is it too much to ask for testing the packages?

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 01:08:37AM +0100, Marek Habersack wrote:

> Hello everybody,
> 
>   First of all - I'm pissed off, so ignore any inflammatory comments should
> I miss to spot them in what I'm going to write. 
> 
>   So, is Sid supposed to be a place where maintainers upload broken packages
> so that others hit the problem and report them as bugs? And I'm not talking
> about big problems, no:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=172677

Yes, this is exactly the sort of problem that should be found in unstable.
The maintainer obviously tested that the package installed correctly for
him; the rest is easily parallelized by unstable users.  By running
unstable, you are volunteering to participate in this testing, and if
someone has misrepresented Debian unstable to you as a production-ready
operating system, they (and you) were misled.  Maintainers are human and
make mistakes, and even when they don't, things go wrong that are not the
maintainer's fault.

In the BTS, you state:
> No, ustable[sic] is not for breaking people's work machines, sorry.

If your work is incompatible with the nature of unstable, then consider
running something else on your work machine.

Also from the BTS:
> 'unstable' doesn't mean 'broken'

'unstable' means 'unstable'.

>From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]:

  unstable
       adj 1: lacking stability or fixity or firmness; "unstable political
              conditions"; "the tower proved to be unstable in the
              high wind"; "an unstable world economy" [ant: {stable}]
       2: highly or violently reactive; "sensitive and highly unstable
          compounds"
       3: affording no ease or reassurance; "a precarious truce" [syn:
           {precarious}]
       4: suffering from severe mental illness; "of unsound mind"
          [syn: {mentally ill}, {unsound}]
       5: disposed to psychological variability; "his rather unstable
          religious convictions"
       6: subject to change; variable; "a fluid situation fraught with
          uncertainty"; "everything was unstable following the coup
          [syn: {fluid}]

I think definition 3 is most applicable in this case.

I think you have acted disrespectfully in handling this bug, and more so by
trying to stir up more conflict on debian-devel.

By the way, your suggestion:

> if you remove a file which you aren't sure whether
> it exists or not, it is nice to do
> 
> rm -f /path/to/file || true
> 
> instead of
> 
> rm -f /path/to/file"

is silly; the entire purpose of the '-f' option to rm is to ignore errors.

-- 
 - mdz