Re: Serializing transitions

[Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net>]

Raphael Hertzog a écrit :
>>> Preparing the transition in experimental is not always done and takes
>>> much more energy than such a system would take.
>> Why, actually?
> 
> I don't an exhaustive answer but here are some points:
> 1/ you can't request bin-nmus of reverse-dependencies in experimental
>    (to verify that all packages build fine with the updated package, and
>    that's one of the main task in preparing the transition)
> 2/ you have to manually reupload a new source package to unstable with all
>    the delay it induces for getting the package built on all arches

Besides, you might have to version build-dependencies so that they are
taken from experimental. Worse, you might have to expand all transitive
build-dependencies and version them so that they are taken from
experimental (sbuild prefers to fail instead of installing from
experimental unless the versioned build-dependency is explicit). This is
too impractical with OCaml, for example: it is impossible to make a
transition in experimental without an insane amount of work, whereas
recompiling all involved packages takes only a few hours (on amd64).

> 3/ some maintainers are too confident that nothing is going to break

And even if they do tests, they cannot do them on all architectures.


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane