Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob@debian.org> writes:
> Let's remember that Kubernetes was never in "stable" to begin with.
> This is not to say that it couldn't be useful in "testing", "unstable"
> or even "experimental". Many packages that may be considered not
> suitable for "production" are nevertheless useful.
Speaking as someone who previously supported having Kubernetes in Debian,
I was using it directly from unstable. For my purposes, it was fine that
it was never part of a stable release.
To be clear, I was mostly happy to have the clients. The control plane
and pod software for my purposes is provided by a platform provider, so is
outside of my scope.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Debian policy is there to shape packages so they fit into stable. If we "know" that a package will never make it into stable, is Policy relevant? Why have packagers do work that will be forever useless? Getting that sort of stuff out of unstable and testing, when we know it will never go further, is also a net benefit reducing the noise and load for the devs. A release blocker on one of those packages, isn't. Forcing people to get stuff from unstable when they want to be running stable (for everything but X) isn't great either.
A "package" that doesn't follow Debian Policy should be walled off and obvious somehow. It's maintenance will be different than most of Debian. Since Debian Policy is sort of the heart of Debian... it basically means that such packages can be built *for* Debian, but can never be *part of* Debian... Having more software available *for Debian* is still a good thing, even if it isn't part of it. Expanding the user base by enabling projects with ... ahem... different maintenance cultures... is still a win. Supporting stuff to be built *for* debian allows much more newer, faster paced, stuff to be made available for the operating system, without jeopardizing the quality of stable.
fwiw, this is one of the things that Launchpad.net provides for Ubuntu, that doesn't seem to be around for Debian.