Re: Re Xemacs needs help
Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 01:33:49PM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
>> All I'm trying to say is that if Emacs CVS snapshots are uploaded to
>> unstable, it should be done with the intention of releasing it in a
>> stable Debian release.
>
> Hmmm, I'm not sure where I stand on your arguments, but I think your
> conclusion is bogus.
>
> Emacs cvs snapshots _definitely_ belong in unstable, but I'm not sure they
> belong in stable. Not because they aren't (usually) quite solid, but because
> the advantage they have over released emacs versions -- frequent updates, and
> the ability to reflect where emacs development is heading at the moment -- is
> lost in stable.
>
> IOW, unstable is _not_ just `stable to be' (though it's _mostly_ that).
That's you opinion, and no offense, but it doesn't matter. The only
opinion that really matters is that of the RM, and he stated his opinion
here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/debian-devel-announce-200308/msg00010.html
And in particular:
In order to ease some of the pressure on unstable, we're encouraging
greater usage of experimental. The plan here is that you should upload
the latest, release-quality packages to unstable; and the latest
development packages to experimental. This means daily snapshots, CVS
versions, alphas, pre-releases and so forth. If you're currently
maintaining a foo-snapshot package in unstable, you should consider
dropping the -snapshot, and uploading it to experimental. It also
means you should make an extra effort to ensure that what you put in
unstable is maintained at the quality you'd expect from a Debian
stable release, although obviously with far more frequent changes. You
won't always succeed, unless you're some sort of packaging God, but
that should definitely be your aim.
> Maybe permanent RC bugs an ugly mechanism to achieve this, but it works for
> the most part; is there some way of marking such a bug so that it will be
> obvious that it's not a `real bug' (and e.g. won't freak out people that are
> obsessing over RC bug counts)?
There are other problems as well. Consider that elisp packages
typically depend on "emacs21 | xemacs21". If you package emacs-cvs,
then those elisp packages should support that too, right? But then
those packages would be depending upon a package that would never exist
in stable, which is an RC bug.
> [Experimental, in its current form, is basically a ghetto of sorts: not only
> is it not auto-built, but people by and large don't use it unless they have
> some special interest in a package which they already _know_ is in
> experimental, and there's something of an expectation that packages there
> have problems of one sort or another.]
Isn't that exactly the type of user that Emacs CVS should be targeting?
--
Don't worry, it's *in*-flammable.
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