Re: How are things going?

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 23:33:48 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> How is dpkg development going atm? I know it's not necessarily a good
> indicator of activity, but I've not seen much happening on this
> list.

Kind of frozen right now, I had a list of stuff I wanted to get done
for etch, but due to holidays and then the freeze I've not done, they
are not critical though, and I've let that aside to deal with other
non-frozen packages to prepare them for the release.

> While I was in Tenerife last week, I met up with Esteban
> Manchado Velazquez and he told me about his ideas for a testing
> framework for dpkg. To me as a rank outsider, this sounds like a cool
> idea, but he was concerned that he hadn't had any responses to his
> mails.

Yes it is, but right now it's a bit painful to do development on dpkg.
I don't really like to use experimental for something like it, even if
I've state in -devel that I've been thinking on branching it. I prefer
to do incremental changes, deploy them, get testing for few weeks, see
if something breaks, and upload again. Creating a big delta in
experimental make me feel unconfortable with something like dpkg.

Also l10n, documentation and similar are cheap to get in, that's why
I've not worried much about pushing that into sid. But any other kind
of changes needs RMs approval and thus takes their time by reviewing
the patches and the justifications, which I prefer to minimize if
possible.

> So, I have a couple of questions: Who (if anybody) is working on dpkg
> at the moment? Is more help needed at the moment?

Christian explained already what's the status right now, who is who
etc. About needed help, I suppose more help would not harm, but I
don't think right now is a good moment to evaluate this, I'd say after
the release we can check what the status is.

thanks for the interest,
guillem