Re: Bug#484009: removed bugs are marked as 'obsolete'
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On 2008-06-04 14:09, Riku Voipio wrote:
> ...for a certain subclass of _powerusers_ who are willing to
> walk through a minefield[1] using buggy software. For more typical
> endusers, buggy and unreliable software is a just big source of
> frustration. For the people willing to live the betaware life,
> there is still unstable out there. The potential damage caused
> by buggy software, atleast if the user hasn't made a conscious
> choice of using "beta" software, is massive.
What is your point? 'testing' is just in between 'stable' and
'unstable'. I started out with debian testing, because it worked fine on
my laptop then, at a time when woody would not work on it at all. It was
my first step into linux (after a short and less successful try at
Suse). I consider myself a complete newbie at the time...
I think there is and there should be some consideration for ordinary
users using testing. It appears that some release managers take
'testing' as their toy, which they may break at their liking.
Things might break in 'testing' software, but things should not be made
worse on purpose.
...since the thread from b.d.o is broken, I dare to copy what was said
there [3]:
Within their efforts to eliminate RC bugs in testing, IMHO the release
managers should not forget that removed packages are marked as
'obsolete', eg. in aptitude.
An ordinary user who uses update-* to check for updates and who installs
other packages by aptitude will notice that those became 'obsolete'. She
or he should remove those 'obsolete' packages from the system, as they
are no longer supported by debian and will be forced to look for
alternatives.
A savvy user, of course will know where to look for the developers
information and might guess that they might be returned in the not too
distant future, because (s)he read on debian-devel that a new maintainer
was found [1]...
...but then again a geek user is not as dependent on update-* than the
ordinary user, I am concerned about [2].
> On 2008-06-04 09:59, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>> We fully address [2]: a broken software, or an inadequate one is more
>> a problem to me than not having it in Debian. Debian is about quality,
>> not quantity.
I totally agree on that.
My point is that it is probably not a good idea to tag a piece of
software as 'obsolete', when it will quite likely reappear after a few
days.
Others have pointed out that despite the bugs, update-* was not unusable
and still useful.
Thanks for your patience and reading up to the end,
Johannes
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/06/msg00049.html
[2] No. 4 of http://www.de.debian.org/social_contract
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=Bug%23484009%3A
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