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Re: package update policy



Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com> writes:

> I just wanted to know if Debian has a policy (timeline) for inclusion of
> a newer release of a software.

No, it doesn't.

Individual maintainers may set such a policy for their own packages, but
Debian has no distribution-wide policy on how fast newer releases of
software are included.  It's not really possible to set such a policy
across the board; sometimes one never wants to incorporate a newer release
of a piece of software for some reason.

> I'm bringing nvidia-kernel-source package as an example because afaik it
> doesn't affect the package freeze for Debian because it is not part of
> the stable release.

Er, well, yes it is, to the extent that non-free is part of Debian at all.
non-free is frozen and released just like everything else; it's just not
part of Debian proper.

> My understanding is that since Debian is completely a voluntary based
> distribution, no one can demand a date for inclusion/updation of any
> package.

Correct.

Right now in particular many of us are holding non-bug-fix releases of the
software packages we maintain so as not to disrupt the archive right
before a hopeful freeze for the etch release.  For instance, once etch is
frozen, I'll upload a new development snapshot of gnubg that fixes a bunch
of minor bugs, none of which are important enough to try to rush into the
release when new development snapshots often have other more significant
bugs that take a while to track down.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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