Allan Jacobsen wrote:
On Tuesday 02 March 2004 14:53, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:Allan Jacobsen wrote:The packages from backports work fine, I have them on all the servers I administer, but they are not official, so I don't know if we should recommend them.Another way of expressing the above is "The packages floating around on the 'net work fine...".Come on Jonas, the packages from backports are hardly random packages floating on the internet, they are, just like your unofficial repository, mostly quality work by debian maintainers, and the result of frustration over things like a spamassassin in woody that removes max 10% of spam, the one from backports is closer to 50%.
And it takes Debian maintainers how many years to do packages reliably enough to release them as a united system?
It is the "mostly" in the above sentence that I dislike.As noted in my previous post I am not against backporting packages (then I wouldn't have approx. 1000 packages at debian.jones.dk). I am against using a package of which you have no idea of its quality.
Using packages officially from Debian is not a proof of "best possible quality", but there's alot of coordinated "eyeballs" and structures proofreading the packages.
Backporting a package - even if done from official Debian source - means taking the package out of its (assumed well-tested) environment.
Example: Many packages built for sarge and sid depend on "perl 5.6 or higher", but has only been tested with perl 5.8. Those package build correctly on Woody, and applications may seem to work well - until a utf8 character shows up in a network stream, and hell breaks lose. I have had several servers crash hard due to utf8 problems making spamassassin and amavisd-new swallow all memory in few minutes.
- Jonas Backporter and official Debian developer -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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