Re: RFC: Why are so many debian packages outdated?
On Wed, 2012-07-25 at 15:13 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Svante Signell <svante.signell@telia.com> writes:
>
> > I think this issue is very relevant to Wheezy. Why are there so many
> > outdated packages going into this release? The whole idea of unstable is
> > (to my understanding) to package the latest upstream releases, and get
> > the bugs squeezed out, right? And when the freeze happens, the latest
> > stable software is available to the next Debian release.
>
> Yes. And therefore you have just answered your own question.
>
> Older software goes into the wheezy release because, at the time of the
> freeze, just as you said above, one of the following was true:
>
> 1. The new release was not packaged for unstable.
> 2. The bugs weren't squeezed out in unstable before the freeze.
>
> It's not particularly complicated, although of course fixing any one
> particular case where we want newer software can be quite complicated
> (because 1 and 2 both have to happen before the freeze).
Well there is experimental that could be used to package pre-releases
and new releases to make them suitable for unstable and testing _before_
the freeze!
Add to that unresponsive package maintainers, refusing to package new
versions of upstream software, even with wishlist bugs filed. Take a
look at the age of some of these bug, both in time and release numbers.
There are people willing to package new releases, but they are blocked
by the current package maintainer. That problem is maybe more related to
the d-d thread entitled: "Hijacking packages for fun and profit" BoF at
DebConf
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