Re: Debian development and release: always releasable (essay)
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote:
> On 05/12/2013 02:03 AM, Antonio Terceiro wrote:
>> You can't assume that just because something works today, it will work
>> forever.
>
> True, though it's been at least 2 release cycle (maybe 3?) that this
> set of packages were maintained quite well. I don't remember
> seeing complains or bad bugs. Do you?
Part of the problem is that some of those important packages don't
have enough manpower.
As an example: There's a RFH bug filled on PHP for a long time, some
people came, but in the end I had to poke Ubuntu PHP maintainer
several times to help me write php5{en,dis}mod, which I could
integrate with PHP. (To see the situation, you can look at ohloh.net:
https://www.ohloh.net/p/pkg-php/contributors/summary)
This (in the end) leads to inevitable situations where I do upload
packages with bugs sometimes, or I just don't have enough time to fix
bugs in time and other (sometimes more virtual than real) team members
are also in slumber.
So apart from the more hands on some packages with high priority, it
would really help me to have some automated tests which would be run
before uploading to testing.
One thing which immediatelly comes to the mind is the install & upgrade test.
1. install every built package
2. try upgrade from stable for every built package
3. try upgrade from testing for every built package
4. try upgrade from unstable for every built package
Optionally:
5. do some testing with all r-deps (treeish?)
I am not sure if we need to do that for all packages in the archive,
but I am writing this from the perspective of maintainer/only active
team member of PHP5 (php5 5.3 -> 5.4 transition), Berkeley DB
(db4.7+db4.8 -> db5.1 transition), Cyrus SASL (cyrus-sasl2), Cyrus
IMAPd (cyrus-imapd-2.2 -> cyrus-imapd-2.4 transition with some crazy
database backends change). And I already have pu for three of four of
them (not very proud of that).
And rails 2.3+3.2, but thanks to Antonio Terceiro (and rest of
pkg-ruby-extra), I don't feel that alone there.
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>
Reply to: