Re: Experimental or unstable.
Simon Huggins dijo [Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:03:37PM +0000]:
> > http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2005/09/30#experimental-useless
>
> See this worries me a bit.
>
> I'd love for Debian users to test some more cutting edge versions of
> packages (partly so upstream gets more testers, partly so I can see the
> bits I hate about the new versions and try to get them fixed) but I
> don't want them in testing now until they are properly released as a
> stable series. In fact, I don't really want them in unstable if it
> means that in order to fix bugs which appear in testing I have to revert
> to the stable set of packages in order to get them in.
>
> I guess the compromise is just to realise that they just won't be
> thoroughly tested when they hit unstable if they've only been in
> experimental before.
Well... I see experimental more as an area where _you_ (be it a person
or a team ;-) ) can test the work you are producing as something
integrated with Debian, not as an isolated piece of work. Of course,
you could set up a private apt repo for that, but it just does not
make sense if we can have it all in the same place.
Sometimes, work in experimental has been more widely used (by a large
group of maintainers), as when having a large transition (thinking
about Gnome) or work useful for many people that simply hasn't been
ironed out (IIRC, OpenOffice1.9 was for some time in experimental, and
it made 2.0 much easier to incorporate into unstable).
Experimental _should not_ be aimed to become a complete distribution
or widely tested. That's what unstable is for. And if unstable breaks
on you... Well, tough luck - you knew what you were facing when you
decided to install it, right?
I prefer to keep unstable free of betas or snapshots - they eventually
migrate into testing, and that's not good (even if your package is
called foo-cvs, foo-snapshot or whatever). If a new major release of a
package will change the way you do your packaging, just _prepare_ the
whole show in experimental.
Greetings,
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)1451-2244 / 5623-0154
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
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