Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R
Philipp Kern wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 12:33:46PM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > I cannot influence the R release cycle which happens within our freeze. As
> > have a few previous R releases, and none of those created any trouble.
>
> Thanks for trading the R release cycle with Debian's and for delaying the
> release. The harm has already been done, so somebody should probably go
> and create a transition tracker for it?
IMO it's important to remember that it's fundamentally the release team
that is at fault for problems here, not the R maintainer. Unstable has
already been frozen for much longer than is in any way reasonable for
either development of Debian, users of Debian unstable, or upstreams
whose current software is either not being packaged at all or is only in
experimental.
I've personally seen as upstream many users suffering from problems
caused by old version in unstable (and had to deal with those problems
caused by Debian). And as a Debian user I've suffered in multiple cases
from outdated software myself; latest was just today when I noticed that
Debian's GDB version is too old to understand the default debug
information format produced by current GCC. I've used Debian because I
think that much of the packaging has been done well technically. But
releases have never been Debian's strong point, and when you have to
compile basic software like GDB yourself it's hard to recommend the
distro for development either (in this case there was no working version
in experimental either; having it only there would have been better than
manual compiling but not in any way adequate IMO).
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