Re: Consider: Move pkgs from Sid to Woody sometimes for progress (was:Re: KDE Packagers...)
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 08:20:04PM -0800, tluxt <tluxt@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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_.
>
>
This issue has come up time and time again on the debian-devel mailing
list, I suggest you read the archives to clarify. But just to summarize
some of the discussions that have gone on. The point of Woody is to help
prepare for the next stable release of Debian. Moving in more recent
packages that have bugs in them to replace outdated packages that don't
is a step in the wrong direction. Just because a package is outdated by
several months does not mean it should be replaced by a new buggy
version.
However, I do agree that for something like KDE, if seriously broken
packages end up in Woody (as has happened in the past, not sure about
the status now) perhaps there should be a way to accellerate the
transition process. Perhaps filing "SID" tagged RC bugs against certain KDE
packages until they are all ready to move in to Woody would help
synchronize the package versions. But again, please read the previous
discussions on this issue to clarify.
Reply to: