On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 02:24:54PM +0200, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: > > At the moment, afaics, packages have only been uploaded to experimental > > for i386 and powerpc. Please make sure they're building on all > > architectures before even considering a major change like this. > Sorry, but this is not easy... Currently my s/390 machine is busy > making coffee ;-) > <joke off>IMO this is quite difficult without experimental having > autobuilder support. Yeah, no one said it was easy. But no one said you had to do it alone, either: you need to get in contact with people yourself and get them to help. Mailing lists, and the Debian contacts page will help you here, as will getting on IRC and pestering for people with appropriate machines. If this means you end up with -4 building on seven architectures, -3 build on two, -2 built on one, and one architecture not built in experimental, that's not necessarily a problem. Only having the packages built on two architectures *is* a showstopper, though. > Perhaps "unstable" should be renamed to "devel" then. Perhaps; but it's not really an option. > But having packages in experimental means things are not so widely > tested, and as I said before there are also problems with having the > packages available in all arches. So somehow this is a chicken - egg > problem. No, it's not. It's a problem that doesn't have a simple solution. That doesn't mean there's no solution; it means you have to put in the effort and do the complicated solution right. X, KDE and glibc have all managed this. You can too. Please take this seriously: if you choose not to, Gnome 2.6 will likely not be making it into Debian at all, let alone sarge. > Leaving apart that I think that for Sarge+1 we should somehow change > the way we relese Debian (I'd like to have a comprehensive *discussion*, > not flamewar, about this when it's the time), I think that we should > start to change something about the way we think on releases. Why > couldn't we move GNOME 2.6 to unstable and then use > sarge-proposed-updates for fixing GNOME 2.4 problems that could appear > until Sarge is released? Because that's not how unstable works. Unstable is where people do development -- when core libraries get broken, like we've seen with glibc and kde amongst others -- that affects large groups of people. When you're in a position to say "Gnome 2.6 doesn't have any major problems we know of, and any major problems we don't know about we'll be able to fix within a week or so" that's the time to upload to unstable. If you're at the point of saying "We hope this'll work; but we don't really know yet", then "experimental" is the place for you. That's not to say our support for experimental is all that top-notch atm -- autobuilding and various other things all should be done; but it _is_ the best way of handling this. testing-proposed-updates is _not_. > Believe me that I understand your way of think, but also try to see > our point. We will have GNOME 2.8 in October. Not being even able to > put 2.6 in sarge Don't get me wrong: I'm all for having 2.6 in sarge. But dumping it in unstable now is the wrong way of achieving that. > Well, I'm talking again about release process > so I'll shut up right now. But I hope you see what I try to express. Sure. I realise this isn't a simple thing we're asking you to do either -- maintaining and using stuff in experimental isn't anyone's idea of a fun time. But it's nevertheless the best way of handling this stuff. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Protect Open Source in Australia from over-reaching changes to IP law http://www.petitiononline.com/auftaip/ & http://www.linux.org.au/fta/
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