Re: Bug#354674: What on earth?
On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 04:31:10PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> - /usr/X11R6/bin/X disapearing broke login managers (gdm, kdm)
> - fonts transition was unanounced and users have either :
> * only non transitionned fonts if their xorg.conf was modified
> * only xorg ones if they use dexconf
> that's a mess.
> - a lot of build depends were missing, something that the first build
> on autobuilders revealed, which makes me wonder if the XSF knows
> about pbuilder and friends ?
You're right about the xfonts issue. I thought we had compatibility
symlinks in place to deal with this. I was wrong. I'm sorry.
As for the build-depends, pbuilder is, as far as I've been able to
understand it, completely incapable of handling such a massive beast as
this. You can't point it easily at a custom repository in order to have it
pull from there. If this has changed recently, I'd love to hear it, but
when I was investigating this during the development of the packages I was
unable to do it. Furthermore, the packages I pulled were autobuilding just
fine on Ubuntu, so I had little reason to believe that they didn't have
proper build-depends for Debian. Indeed, very few of the packages ftbfs'ed,
and most of these were fixed within hours of being reported.
> Well, knowing to apology is good, but knowing how to prepare a
> transition is also needed. I just can quote steve on this :
>
> ? So far I'm very unimpressed with the resultant bug count from the
> ? Xorg 7 transition.
>
> I can predict that the Xorg 7.0 will be the messiest debian will have to
> face in years, because everything is done in a hurry, and that each new
> uploads adds as many bugs (if not twice as many) as it solves.
I'd like for you to back this claim up. So far I've fixed dozens of bugs
over the course of the past week at great personal and professional cost of
my time, energy, and health. And I plan to keep whittling away at the bugs
until the transition is as clean as I can possibly make it. But to say that
I'm introducing more bugs than I'm fixing is insulting.
> So maybe it's now time to calm down the upload rate (yeah unstable is
> broken, but it's too late for that anyway, and after all it's not
> called unstable for nothing), let's have some communication to have it
> fixed, instead of pile of clumsy patches.
I'm fixing bugs as fast as I can because that's what's needed right now.
I'm willing to accidentally slip in a clumsy upload if it'll lead to a
proper fix over the course of another day, especially if it allows me to
fix 4 other bugs in the time frame I spent exhaustively testing every
possibility.
> Could please the XSF communicate, and announce what that damn transition
> implies for *everybody*, instead of letting anybody finds out that
> their package is broken. I suggest [1] as a very good template for what
> communicating about a transition means.
I communicated, to the best of my knowledge, what the transition meant in
the past [0]. I wasn't aware that I would be breaking a large amount of
packages until after I uploaded to unstable. These packages have largely
been in use in Ubuntu for several months already. They have been in
experimental for several months as well, during which time I fixed every
bug that came in about them. I communicated with the release team what my
plans were at all stages, and while I didn't realize the scope of the
disruption, I did my absolute best to keep everyone involved informed.
Every single change I've done to these packages has been documented on
debian-x via the svn commits, so everyone could see what I've been doing if
they cared to look.
I have yet to file bugs against other packages that I've affected because I
haven't had time. This is a serious problem, but I have hundreds of
packages to actively look after during this transition and I'd appreciate
any sort of help that can be offered.
Anyway, I'm going to continue to work hard on this. If you want to help dig
us out of it, I'll welcome any patches you care to submit that are up to
your standards of quality. Until then though, feel free to kiss my ass.
- David Nusinow
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