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Re: Dependancies of Debian Archive (FYI)



On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 12:53:08AM -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> I did some quick(*) research(**) on the Debian archive (stable, testing,
> unstable combined) and found out followings:
>   12% of packages had dependencies with more than 5 other packages
>   88% of packages had dependencies with less than 6 other packages

"more than 5", "5 or less" or "6 or more", "less than 6" -- please, my
brain can only stand so much.

> As you can see, most (>75%-90%) packages have very limited impact to
> the archive consistency.  

How about virtual-packages? I notice you have:

	494 smail
	423 exim
	 33 postfix
	 27 sendmail
	  7 postfix-tls
	  4 exim-tls

But, in some sense, all these packages are more or less equally
important; the most important thing all these packages do is provide
mail-transport-agent, and if we lose exim we can relatively easily
replace it with any of the others.

You might also want to look at collating by source package.

> Currently, minor release does not allow any upstream version bumping but
> just security bug fixes.  I wonder that is the right approach or not for
> these *less* important packages.

>   88% of packages had dependencies with less than 6 other packages

There's no way we can ensure random minor updates of some 8000 packages
are suitable for stable updates. One thing we don't want to do is force
sysadmins to check every point update for regressions before rolling
it out.

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.

  ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- 
        you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''

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