Re: >2000 packages still waiting to enter testing, > 1500 over age

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 09:33:32PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 12:01:57PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Well, i personnaly think that in some case it would be much simpler to
> > _remove_ the packages from testing, and let the new versions enter
> > testing as they can. 
> 
> Yes, this generally happens. It's not really a good thing though -- it
> screws up people who are using / relying on the packages being removed;
> they'll get complaints from apt-get every time they try to upgrade until
> things get cleaned up. cf libc6 and php recently, eg.

Yes, this is the general case, and i fully understand this.

But in the particular case, the two blocking packages are really seldom
used (two developpment packages only) and most people don't use the
ocaml 3.04 that is in testing, but ocaml 3.06 backports.

I think this is one of the cases where the maintainer has more idea of
what is going on than the release manager, since he has a closer tie to
the user community of said packages. I don't think the same could be
said for the libvorbis case though.

That said, the real question is what testing is for :

  o To help prepare the next release, in which case we should remove
    conflicting packages.

  o So people can test the next release without being subject to random
    unstable breakage. In this case, we should not remove the
    conflicting packages.

Friendly,

Sven Luther