Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R
Scott Kitterman wrote:
> If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to believe that creating the release is
> somehow the release team's job. It's not. The job belongs to all of us.
No, that's not what I'm saying. But I think the release team is
primarily responsible for the policies that harm the work other
maintainers do on unstable.
A release must not be the only goal for package maintainers, and IMO it
should not be an overriding one either. Distributions that make latest
software available are necessary for free software development. It's not
responsible for Debian to say "development of new software should happen
on a distro like Arch, we'll just use the results". And Debian is too
big to be just for people that care about releases only; if it gathers
packagers and then actively hinders their ability to work on packaging
the latest versions, that hurts free software development overall. So
keeping unstable in good shape and up to date is an important goal,
independently of its usefulness as material for releases.
If the release process only failed to create a new release in a timely
manner and before it's already obsolete, that alone wouldn't be so much
of an issue. But the way it's now done actively keeps other maintainers
from doing useful work that they would otherwise be doing. And I don't
think "they should have done some other different work first" is enough
of an excuse to justify that.
Reply to: