Re: galeon (not) in Debian stable
On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 08:18:30PM +0200, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
> Of course, you're the maintainer of galeon, and most probably know
> better, but I really wonder what issues make galeon 1.3
> non-releasable-quality from your point of view (and the other "most
> people").
ok. This is the first release process since I've become a Debian
developer. Perhaps my thoughts are wrong.
The reason Debian is so great and the reason Debian is different to
other distributions is the quality of its packages. Users can expect to
install Debian once and then upgrade every couple of years, taking just a
few minutes of their time. They should then be able to use the system
pretty much as before - Most importantly, no need to upgrade any
packages or spend hours configuring things. To make this possible, the
software we ship has to be stable, well tested and IMHO, complete.
I believe many people (myself included) would like the situation to be
different for Desktop users - perhaps having a 6-month release cycle in
which the very latest software would be included and we can do more
things for 'political reasons'. We should not e thinking of this at the
current time though - sarge is going to be a traditional Debian release
with the same quiality (or better) of all the others.
So, the major issues I have with galeon at present:
- Constant stream of bug reports. This indicates that people are clearly
not happy (even if many of them are wishlist). [Perhaps we should have
a system where 50 normal bugs = 1 RC bug? - Moving this idea to
debian-devel]
- Many usability issues reported. I really like galeon; having a broken
version (wrt usability) in Debian is likely to damage galeon's
reputation with its current users. If galeon is not included, current
users will likely get it from a sarge backport, which could well be
galeon 2.0 (I sent a message to debian-devel earlier this evening with
'experimental' ideas which could make these backports more official)
- I'm releasing cvs snapshots weekly (ish). Every one fixes bugs and
brings improvements and new features. When do we stop doing this and
say this version will go into sarge? We cannot release with a cvs
snapshot from a few weeks before sarge is relased - it needs thotough
testing. A galeon upstream feature freeze in the next few days might
really help change my mind. What do the galeon developers think of
this?
- General unfinished feel. I think Debian releases should be polished
products. Galeon currently lacks documentation, has many options
hidden away, has some big bugs in places (printing crashes a lot for
me, focus sometimes changes when pages load in background tabs,
refresh bypassing X options don't work).
- Although less important, we should take note that gnome and red hat
have not included galeon.
I'm only the maintainer of the Debian galeon packages - It would be
great if the upstream galeon developers would send their thoughts -
should we release 1.3.7 in sarge?; will 2.0 be ready in a few
days/couple of weeks? :)
--
.''`. Mark Howard
: :' :
`. `' http://www.tildemh.com
`- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
Reply to: