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



On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 10:18:54AM +0100, Bart Schuller scribbled:
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 03:07:24AM +0100, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:
> > i asume a fairly large number work in unstable or testing anyway. Hmm..
> > wonder if popcon can answer me that.
> 
> I know I do, on my home machine and more than ten workstations and about
> ten servers at my company.
All the workstations I have installe or use and a couple of servers run
unstable (the servers have been running unstable since the potato days :)) -
and till these past few months, running unstable on servers was not scary.
There were bugs, sure, but you could read about them in the BTS or on the
mailing lists. The kind of bugs that seems to be plaguing Debian now doesn't
fall in neither of those categories. They are dumb bugs, maintainer's (not
even programmer's!) bugs which would have been removed if the packages were
tested in the most basic way. And every maintainer should be required to
test at least all the pre* and post* scripts in their package(s). If they
don't have time for that, they should quit or ask for help.

> Repeating the mantra "unstable is not for general use" does not make it
Exactly.

> true. I think the people who love Debian the most are probably not
> patiently waiting more than a year for the next stable to appear.
> They'll have discovered the power of apt (and recently apt-listchanges
> and the other thing which shows bugs before you're installing them.
> amazing!)
It's great, yep, too bad it doesn't check the installation scripts, too
:-)))

[snip]
> "testing" could have been/will be the ideal distribution for lots of
> people, but for me, the occasional need to add an "exit 0" to a
occasional, yes, but if it happens in three or four releases of one package
in a row, or if several bugs of that kind pop up during one daily run of
apt-get - something's definitely going fishy somewhere.

> postgresql prerm file, or to do without mozilla-snapshot for one day is
> still preferable to having to backport stuff.
Yes, I agree with you and I don't mind doing that on occasion (and to report
such things to the mainainers, of course) but if the time you waste for that
grows beyond one hour a day, it's getting serious. That's one hour less left
for work just to make your machine work at times. I said that several times
and I will repeat it here - all I ask for is a little care, basic care,
about your packages. It's not hard to roll up a simple test suite which
consists of installing the package, upgrading it, purgin, reinstalling. That
request especially goes to those who maintain big, largery depended upon or
important packages.

> I'd like to see Debian follow (probably through "testing") the XP motto
> that everything should be ready for release, all of the time.
Yes, that would be good. Very good.

regards,

marek

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