Re: A hack to alleviate transitions in Britney; now what?
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:48:22AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
> [I'm personally slightly concerned about relaxing britney allowing
> testing to get into unreleasable states; a flag to re-enable the old
> behavoir late in release would probably be good.]
Adeodato's proposal makes a lot of sense, but still I agree with the above.
"Always in a releasable state" was a good design decision for testing, and
this change will muddy the idea a bit further.
At the very least, there should be an auto-generated web page listing
packages in testing that are currently unreleasable!
For a cleaner separation, testing could be split it two: The normal,
releasable testing works according to the strict rules as before. A second,
add-on repository (let's call it "mouldy";-) can realize Adeodato's idea:
It is only intended to be added to sources.list _in addition to testing_,
and contains out-of-date library packages and the programs which depend on
them.
Rather than removing packages from testing to make way for a new
transition, britney would move them over to "mouldy". This way, they would
still be available. At the same time, the fact that they moved there is a
clear sign to the respective maintainers that they need to do something to
get their packages into a releasable state.
Once the problem is resolved, those packages which only indirectly depended
on the library transition can be moved back from "mouldy" to testing
without recompilation.
I can't say I'm too much of an expert with these issues, so there may be
problems with this scheme. For example, it is possible that "mouldy" would
end up containing everything and testing would be empty, which would buy
you nothing. :)
Cheers,
Richard
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