Re: State of Jenkins in Debian

[Guido Günther <agx@sigxcpu.org>]

Hi Tony,
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 09:43:48PM -0700, tony mancill wrote:
[..snip..] 
> In any event, I can sympathize and am glad that you're opening the
> discussion.  Not everything is going to fit the "stable" distribution
> model - sometimes you need the "freshest bits."

We do have stable-backports for the freshness part. Because of the great
work of the Debian Java Team it is becoming more and more possible to
run popular Java based web applications like Jenkins on Debian with
Debian's benefits attached (apt-get install, DFSG, Policy, Bug tracker,
security support) and without having to resort to third party sources or
to download heaps of artifacts of untrusted origin.

This might not be that important if you're a Java Shop (TM) and rely on
latest versions (but then why would you run the version in Debian then
anyway). But if you're only a consumer of the resulting Web Application
(e.g. like Jenkins for CI) then Debian's Java packages in stable are
_extremely_ valuable. Especially so if they cover the whole stack from
the JDK to the web application and if they're part of a stable
release because that's what got well integrated and tested during the
freeze. PPAs don't have this kind of "integration gurantee" and might be
a too fast moving target for mere "consumers" of the web appliation.
What would be the benefit over getting the .deb from jenkins.org?

So to decide what version's should be shipped in stable please take into
account whom you ship it for.

Cheers,
 -- Guido

P.S.: I'm taking jenkins only an example here although it's not part of
stable release (yet)