Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R
Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Uoti Urpala, le Mon 01 Apr 2013 05:12:46 +0300, a écrit :
> > Distributions that make latest
> > software available are necessary for free software development.
>
> Again, that's one of the things experimental is for.
It is not. You can't reasonably install things from experimental rather
than unstable by default, nor is there a flag for "this really should be
in unstable if not for badly managed release" which would allow
autoinstalling those packages. Consider the GDB example I mentioned
earlier; GDB 4.5 should be installed by default for users of unstable,
rather than expecting them to notice that their system has become too
outdated, investigate it and find out which package to manually update.
It is unreasonable to tell the users and upstreams that Debian is going
to keep users on a known inferior version by default for a long time,
just in case more testing is needed to discover problems in the release
version (often in addition to multiple already discovered problems that
Debian is intentionally leaving for users to suffer from, as the most
natural way to fix them would be to update to a newer upstream version).
Also, many things don't get separately packaged in experimental, like
GDB 4.5 isn't (I don't know whether this particular case is due to
release or maintainer otherwise not keeping it up to date, but there are
lots of extra issues due to release, and most of them are unlikely to be
because of maintainer being too busy with other release work).
Reply to: