Consider: Move pkgs from Sid to Woody sometimes for progress (was:Re: KDE Packagers...)
[Thanks for all the info, Ben! Just one thought cause I am too short of time
to make the several replies/questions I'd like to make.) :) :( ]
--- Ben Burton <benb@acm.org> wrote:
> As for woody, the koffice in woody is very old (June/July 2001). The
reason
> for this is the frequent updates and the fact that koffice is very large
and
> thus takes some time to be built for all architectures, by which time
there's
> often been another upload and so on and so on. At the moment all that's
> keeping koffice out of woody is an arm rebuild and two more days' wait, and
> unless some major bug is discovered I'm not going to do another upload
until
> 1.1.1 has progressed into woody. So cross your fingers and koffice for
woody
> might be up to date in the order of days.
I am wondering if it might be better for the community as a whole (by
satisfying, say 85% of peoples needs sooner, rather than wait a long time to
satisfy 100% of peoples needs) if on special occasions sw was deliberately
moved from Sid to Woody in advance of when it would normally get there by
the current rules of migration.
After all, the rules of migration are not laws of physics, nor the word
of an almighty lawgiver. They are merely a policy of a human organization.
Perhaps I'm really suggesting that the Debian community might be better
served if it adopted a more sophisticated and beneficial policy about
moving packages from Sid to Woody.
It seems to me that if the Woody packages are more than a month older than
the packages in Sid, a human should intervene and deliberately move a decent
quality more recent version of that SW into Woody. The version moved in
needn't be bug free. But, it should be moved if in fact it is an
improvement, on the whole, over the month old package in Woody.
Along these lines, I am generally in favor of supporting important, although
small market share, archetectures. But I think it might me better for the
community as a whole to have a stated policy about appropriate times when
a package could be moved from Sid to Woody (FSTW) despite that fact that a
build was lacking/lagging for a minor market share processor (MMSP).
It's a tradeoff. A large part of the community is in fact hurt to some
finite
extent by making everyone wait due to a MMSP build not being available.
Perhaps the policy might be that a package could be moved FSTW if all but
1 (or 2? n?) MMSF builds were available.
A similar line of reasoning would apply to bugs - It's ok to move it if
there are mot major bugs that cause extensive loss of functionality.
Caveat: I'm not a package maintainer, so have only a Debian user's
perspective
on this issue. And, also don't know if developers have considered &
rejected this idea already, for some reason.
Is the above an idea that would be beneficial to be considered by the larger
(not just KDE) Debian community? Would it be possible for the K-D community
to have a policy of moving KDE specific packeges FSTW different from that
of Debian's general policy?
Or, maybe there is a way for a maintainer to accomplish this without a policy
change - Ex: not upload a new package for a few days, giving the existing
Sid package enough time to reach the (what is it?) 2 week stable time
so it could migrate on its own.
Six months - to me even 1.5 months - just seems like _too long_.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions!
http://auctions.yahoo.com
Reply to: