Re: Packages without long term stable releases
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016, Simon McVittie wrote:
> This sounds quite a lot like the "rolling" suite that gets proposed
> every few years, with the possible exception that some proposals
> for "rolling" have had it bypass unstable while unstable is frozen,
> and it sounds as though this doesn't.
>
> I think this would be good to have, particularly if the backports team
> can treat it as a valid source for backports to stable, at least for
> packages that are not also present in testing. If a package
+1
That said I'm a bit concerned by the idea of splitting up repositories
when all the packages are combined in unstable at the start.
The testing vs rolling difference does not make much sense because we
have a reasonably up-to-date system where newer versions can be packaged.
The problems really start later when testing has become stable... it gets
harder and harder to build updated versions of the "rolling" packages
as the "core" is no longer getting updates (like newer libstdc++ or python
that some packages like chromium or firefox tends to require, both are
real examples).
That's why it makes sense to filter out leaf packages that have no
explicit LTS support at the time we change testing into stable. We should
avoid doings promises that we can't honor.
Thus we need a way to tag packages so that everybody can know whether a
package has proper LTS suppport (either from upstream or from Debian).
And we need mechanisms/procedures to ensure that all packages which are
build dependencies and libraries are part of the stable core.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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