On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 11:15:46AM +0000, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: > Pierre Habouzit wrote: > > > But forcing every maintainer that probably had an agenda for their > > package already, to comply to yours without even knowing what's coming > > is at the very least tactless and disruptive. > > the new dpkg was in experimental for a long enough time, and this was > announced often enough. If packages run into trouble with it now, it's > imho not the problem of the dpkg maintainer (except there're bugs in > dpkg, of course). I disagree. We have (Raphael among the "we") little clues right now on how well the new implementation will work on a large scale. We already see a lot of nasty failures happen that aren't expected, because the maintainers that will likely suffer from those the most, are the one that already had the less time to test it. "announcing" a new feature and giving a time-frame for people to conform and then shoot them, is not really what I call management. Proper management includes a staging period between the absence of the failure, and the full pedantic activation of it. There is a huge difference between a dpkg in experimental that many a couple of people tried, and being forced to suffer its disruption during a transition or a long planned upload. So I urge Raphael to keep the "errors" warnings for a month so that people can get used to it, and take proper measures. The disruption it caused to the KDE guys (and I fear for OOo or moizilla) isn't _that_ surprising to me, and it's completely unfair to prevent them from doing anything. Because that's what dpkg-shlibdeps does: the KDE team think it's a 3days effort to support the new dpkg-shlibdeps. They had plans, it gets all destroyed because there wasn't an incremental introduction of the feature. What I've learned, and I believed that Debian should know since: in computing (and I believe in many other areas) *NOTHING* works according to the plan. So you'd better have a progressive plan to keep the issues manageable. The "Off->On" switch button is the worst one can do in that regard. I absolutely don't understand what Raphael has to gain by forcing everyone to fix their package *RIGHT NOW OR YOU DIE HAHAHAHA*, except raising the frustration levels wrt a migration that I believe goes in the good direction. It's not because it's a good thing that it should be aggressively forced and imposed to the face of the world. -- ·O· Pierre Habouzit ··O madcoder@debian.org OOO http://www.madism.org
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