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Re: What to do when DD considers policy to be optional? [kubernetes]



On 2020-04-05 21:15 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> having an obsolete version of the software distributed
> with/through Debian is (rightfully) seen a liabilty by some upstreams,
> not as an asset.

I think a more interesting/important question is whether users like
it, rather than whether upstreams like it.

Quite a lot of users just want to use stuff and so long as it works
for their purposes they really don't know or care if it is 2 years
old. I quite often find myself in this situation. Quite a lot of
software is not something you want to care about - you just want to
use it.

Now of course things get sticky when the old version _doesn't_ work
for the user's purpose (which happens sometimes) and they to go to bug
upstream about the issue (rather than bugging debian). 

So long as most users will find it works for them, then I think it's
still really useful for us to package stuff, because it's good for our
users, whatever upstreams would prefer. What proprtion of users are
likely to find a 2-yr old version satisfactory is a judgement for
packagers (who will be left with the resulting bugs).

In cases like this its also good to document that bugs should go to
debian, not upstream, although of course not many people read docs so
that won't work as well as one might like. 

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/

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