Re: GNOME 2.1.x is not ready for Debian
On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 09:24:40AM -0500, Graham Wilson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 04:12:05PM +0200, Stefan Schwandter wrote:
> > Graham Wilson wrote:
> > > > Could i ask that we _DON'T_ put 2.1.x in experimental, but in a
> > > > separate staging area. When the time is right for it that is
> > > > naturally.
> >
> > > that means we would have to find a maintainer who is willing.
> > > experimental isnt all to difficult. just be sure not to do:
> >
> > > # apt-get upgrade -t experimental upgrade
> >
> > > as that might mess your system up.
> >
> > I think his point was, that the current packages in experimental
> > shouldn't be replaced by new, 2.1.x ones, and I agree with him here. How
> > is gnome2 for debian supposed to stabilize if always the latest snapshot
> > release is uploaded?
>
> i agree also. i wasnt saying that 2.1.x should be put in experimental,
> but simply that there is nothing wrong with using experimental, as i
> think that is how sven feels. i was simply trying to point out that
> there is nothing wrong with using experimental.
Like said, right now gnome2 is in experimental, and we can do nothing
against it. But next time this happen (when we will package gnome 2.2 or
whatever) we might want to change this and use a staging area (altough,
like said, the fact that someone has to manage it is a problem).
The problem is that it is not easily guessable what you have to do, and
what you can break when using experimental. The only official docs on
experimental is that it is for stuff too new and which may break many
things and better left alone. This means it is for people who know what
to do with it, and how to handle it, not, like we are using it, for a
stage before unstable, which we expect many user will be using (so we
have feedback and can fix bugs and other such).
Sure, you can, with a proper apt-get invocation, handle it correctly,
but the first thing that people will do is the one they should not do.
If even i, who am a developper and at least have an idea how things
work, was tempted to do it the wrong way, how do you hope to stop a
simple user from saying, hey, gnome2 is cool, gnome2 is even packaged as
debian packages in experimental, let's add the apt source list to
experimental and install the stuff, so ... first apt-get -t experimental
install gnome, ... some day pass, ... apt-get -t experimental upgrade,
and the user will not pay attention and install broken pam libs or other
maybe even more dangerous things. How is he to know what is really part
of gnome or not, between the 30+ packages that get installed.
> when and _if_ the time comes to upload 2.1.x, i think it should be done
> in experimental, not in a staging area that a developer would have to
> maintain. but that time is not now, as we still have 2.0 issues to work
> out.
Mmm, right the time is not now, let's hope by that time we have maybe
separate staging areas that are automated, even maybe autobuilt.
When we did create the pool stuff a year back or more, the idea was to
have justly these staging areas for all these subparts of debian, and
migrate them all in one go into unstable when they are ready. But then,
this never really got implemented, and i really don't know why, but that
would have been nice for the gnome2 mess.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
>
> --
> gram
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