Re: For those who care about their packages in Debian
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> But the solution would best entail allowing ‘unstable’ to continue to be
> used for the same purpose regardless of whether a freeze is currently
> active, no?
This, *in general*, doesn't work because of the way library transitions
work. If you upload a new upstream version of a library to unstable, you
can really ruin the release team's month, since then other packages in
unstable can pick up dependencies to things that aren't going to be
released and it all turns into a big mess. This is really bad, and indeed
people need to not be doing that.
Uploading new versions of leaf software isn't *as* big of a disaster, but
it does mean that updates to that software that should go into testing
can't go through the normal testing process and have to go through
testing-proposed-updates, which is way riskier. This isn't good. So for
anything that's releasing with squeeze, please upload any subsequent
versions *not* aimed at squeeze to experimental instead. (Although there
are some weird exceptions; for example, we continue to upload Lintian to
unstable all the way through a release since it mostly doesn't matter what
exact version of Lintian releases with squeeze.)
But completely new packages that have never been in unstable before and
that aren't libraries and won't show up in dependencies I think don't
cause any problems other than a probably imperceptible increase in the
length of time the testing propagation scripts take to run. But if I'm
missing something, I'd love to know and learn.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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