Re: KDE and Gnome panel applets showing percentage of broken packages

[Berke Durak <berke.durak@inria.fr>]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 08:18:56PM +0000, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 04:25:23PM +0100, Berke Durak wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > We are collecting Debian metadata daily and running installability
> > checks.  For instance, today, 1.3% of the packages in unstable/i386 are
> > broken.  The worst in the past 3 months has been on September 10th and
> > 11th with 7.8% and 7.7% of packages broken in unstable.  These were
> > particularly bad days for upgrading your packages.  This data can
> > be browsed online at :
> 
> Hello Berke,
> I find this kind of global analysis extremly interesting, because we
> tend to see the distribution as a set of packages and miss the big
> picture.

Thanks.

> However, I am unsure what "broken" above means?

To say that a package (say boson-base version 0.11-4) is broken in a
given set of packages (say, unstable on December the 5th on i386) is to
say that there is no way to select a set of packages containing the
package we are interested in plus its dependencies, dependencies of its
dependencies, and so on, and no conflicts.  For example, boson-base
0.11-4 is broken in unstable because it depends on boson 0.12dfsg1-2 ;
however boson 0.12dfsg1-2 conflicts with boson base, according to the
Debian metadata.  Hence, either the metadata is wrong, or there is a
problem with packages.

> Is not the whole purpose of dependencies is to prevent upgrades to
> break packages ?

Indeed.

> Why would a package be 'broken' because if depend on packages that are
> not yet in sid ?

This is a policy question that I don't want to address because I am not
knowledgeable enough of the issues around this.  I assume there are a
lot of Debian experts here who can argue about this for weeks.

I will just say that in my opinion, a repository such as stable, testing
or unstable should be self-contained.  In other words, for every package
in the repository, there should be a way to install it using the
packages from the repository.  That is the whole point of free software.
What would be the point of writing GPL stuff if it depends on commercial
closed-source software costing $1,000 per seat per year ?

Cheers too,
-- 
Berke Durak