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Re: Distribution and support for Debian-502-i386-netinst



Marc Haber wrote:
>On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:26:33 +0000, Ben Hutchings
><ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>I can't imagine why you would expect this to work.
>
>I wouldn't. The site was just surprised by the point release and did
>notice the deployment failure well before the announcement of the
>point release was received. This deployment setup has been in effect
>for a while, so I'd guess that this point release was the first to
>break compatibility between older kernel/initrd and current kernel
>udebs. If this is in fact the rule, I need to investgate why things
>used to work for years, but not having older point releases around any
>more, this is kind of hard to reproduce.

snapshot.debian.org is very helpful if you want to try to
reproduce/test this kind of thing.

...

>>Just point to the bug report and stop stirring.
>
>Do you really think that this tone to users of your software will get
>you any friends? You're being unnecessarily rude and impolite.

You already posted a bug report and complained at Ben there, please
don't continue here.

>#645308, by the way.
>
>>  I'm sorry this has
>>introduced a regression for these systems, but you have a workaround
>>and the backport enabled installation on many other systems.
>
>In nearly all non-kernel issues, we don't care zilch about enhancing
>support and new features if there is the slightest chance of breaking
>existing setups inside a stable release. I fail to see why the kernel
>is so special that it warrants an exception. In fact, the kernel is
>the last component of a distribution I would be willing to accept a
>"more features" upgrade in a stable point release because of the vast
>variety of things that can go wrong when a driver is updated _and_ the
>fact that there is no way to install x.y.z-1 after the release of
>x.y.z.

The kernel team have done an excellent job of backporting drivers for
newer hardware for a number of releases now. Mistakes occasionally
happen...

In terms of *why* those updates happen, that's quite simple: if Debian
won't run on a user's new hardware, that user will typically simply
ignore Debian. In (most) other packages, this isn't so critical - the
latest shiny version doesn't matter that much. Up-to-date hardware
support is one of the biggest issues I see reported about Debian with
our long release cycles, so I'm very supportive of people like Ben who
are directly spending a lot of their time on trying to solve the
problem.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt


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