Re: Is Sid for broken stuff? Is it too much to ask for testing the packages?
On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 01:08:37AM +0100, Marek Habersack wrote:
> Another case of an untested package. Going back to postgres - apparently the
> maintainer "has no time" to test upgrades from earlier formats of the
This is really, really unfair.
The Postgres upgrade process is a very complex one, fraught with having to
keep binaries from previous packages around, setting up a Postgres execution
environment with the old version despite having the new version (with
possibly incompatible files) installed, etc.
These are things that our package framework does not make easy, particularly
the keeping binaries from the previous version.
In order to do the dump and restore from dump, it also has to modify the
configuration to make sure its dumping processes have permissions to access
all the data.
There are also interesting dump situations (where a plain dump doesn't
necessarily build a database the same as the old one) involving, if memory
serves, stored procedures and sequence types.
In short, there are lots of corner cases, special cases, etc. that it may
not even be POSSIBLE for the maintainer to test. (How many old versions of
Postgres can you really have installed? Some versions people have installed
may not even exist in the Debian archive any more.)
And, as a disclaimer, I personally have been bitten by these postgres
upgrade bugs. Guess what -- I file bug reports and help Oliver find the
problem rather than childishly whining about it in debian-devel. While I'm
at it, I say to myself "I'm glad I'm not maintaining this" :-)
> 2h of worktime to recover - if the package was tested by the maintainer
Yes, maintainers should test packages before uploading them. Maintainers
are also human. If maintainers were able to catch all possible bugs before
uploading a package, there'd be no need for testing or for our BTS.
Bugs exist. Get on with your life.
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