On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 03:32:59PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> The way I see it, it doesn't matter one bit whether anyone even _looks_ at
> testing until we start to prepare for a release. Until that time, all of
> the "testing" happens in unstable, and "testing" is misnamed.
And around we go again. The "testing" that is meant to be happening on
testing is user-level testing, not "is this package completely fucked
over". That means things like:
* can we install the system?
* can we upgrade smoothly from previous releases?
* does the behaviour of the system match the docs?
Unfortunately, we've regressed into being unable to maintain unstable
at minimal levels of quality, so the relevance of any of the above is
somewhat distant.
All these discussions remind me a lot of phrases like "fiddling while
Rome burns". Seriously: we've got well over 700 RC bugs in unstable;
we've got an installer that barely works at best; and we're spending
all our time trying to find excuses _not_ to work on these things?
Here's a thought experiment for y'all. First, you notice that glibc
is holding lots of things in testing up. Second, you notice it has two
outstanding RC bug reports: #181493 about Sun RPC code being potentially
non-free, and #181494 about the GNU FDL as used in glibc being non-free.
Third, you notice not much has been done about these bugs. The question
is: is your instinctive response:
(a) Post to Debian lists / websites about how horrible all this is,
and how someone (else) should do something about it.
(b) Try to convince everyone (or at least me) that those bugs
aren't that important and shouldn't hold back glibc from
testing.
(c) Take it upon yourself to contact -legal to make sure you
understand the problems (and that they're real), and to
talk to upstream, and get the license clarified or changed
as appropriate.
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.
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