Re: Successful and unsuccessful Debian development tools

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi>]

ti, 2006-08-01 kello 15:31 +0100, martin f krafft kirjoitti:
> also sprach Pierre Machard <pmachard@debian.org> [2006.08.01.1501 +0100]:
> > snapshot.debian.net (still not-official but very usefull
> 
> This is very interesting, especially in the light of version control
> for packaging -- which could also make packages from the past
> accessible.

Note that source code version control does not always make it easy to
re-create the exact same binary package. If, for example, the package
uses debhelper, and the binary package that actually exist{s,ed} in
Debian was built with an older version of debhelper, re-building the
package from source now with a newer debhelper might not result in a
package that behaves in the same way. For example, the old version might
have not called an init.d script via invoke-rc.d, but the new one does.
This may make things more difficult to debug.

> Could you give me some insights, please, into how snapshot.d.n is
> useful? Don't get me wrong, I also find it useful, but mostly from
> the administrator perspective, I've not really used it as
> a developer.

I've used snapshot.d.n once or twice to look for when a problem due to
debhelper changes like described above changed its behavior.

-- 
When in doubt, use brute force.