[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Bug#964248: marked as done (base-installer: Pass "--extra-suites=unreleased" to debootstrap on ports arches)



John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, le lun. 17 août 2020 10:36:43 +0200, a ecrit:
> On 8/17/20 10:28 AM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, le lun. 17 août 2020 10:17:24 +0200, a ecrit:
> >> "unreleased" is not a regular package archive and all
> >> packages in there are usually only added temporarily.
> > 
> > AFAIK that's not what ports' daily life really is.
> 
> Yes, it is. I actually think I have a good overview over this.

Then opinions differ and we need to discuss about it among porters
because that's really not something I have seen specific to the Hurd, I
have seen other porters wanting this.

> >> Does Debian Hurd require packages from "unreleased" for it's base system?
> > 
> > The Hurd needs netdde from there. It happens that the hurd package
> > itself is still in sid but that's only by luck because there's the
> > arch:all hurd-doc package.
> 
> And that package is required for the base-system and cannot be installed
> later?

netdde contains the network drivers, so yes, it is pretty much part of
the base system. Strictly speaking it could be installed "later" at the
task installation stage, but people are supposed to be able to skip that
step and still having a system that works.

> > But that's far from being specific to the Hurd. Various ports have
> > various requirements such as bootloaders.
> 
> These are always shipped on the installation CD. It also affects m68k
> only as alpha, hppa, powerpc, ppc64, sh4 and sparc64 use either GRUB or have
> their bootloaders in unstable. 
> 
> Does Hurd not use GRUB?

It does. I'm just here mentioning one of the cases that I have seen
mentioned from other ports. I don't know the details there, but there
are probably others like firmware packages, etc.  Yes probably these
can also be shipped by hand on debian-cd, but that looks to me like
duplicate work while we can simply enable unreleased.

> >> Since "unreleased" is not properly maintained due to the fact that all
> >> packages there are built and uploaded manually, I rather prefer them not
> >> to be enabled by default, especially not for the base system.
> > 
> > They are uploaded manually by the porters themselves. They are
> > responsible for what they upload there, so I don't see why it would
> > be harmful? On the contrary, it provides flexibility for fixing
> > installability without having to wait for sid to have fixes uploaded.
> 
> The problem with "unreleased" is that there are no binNMUs and no proper
> maintenance by a package maintainer. I always try to avoid using "unreleased"
> whenever possible.

Sure. But that's very convenient to keep things installable without
having to wait for sid to catch up with whatever issue is encountered by
the port. Otherwise the sid upload latency makes the port uninstallable
for long periods of time, possibly all the time when these periods
overlap.

Samuel


Reply to: