On 02/09/15 11:41 AM, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
I know I've been using Debian for a long time. That's why I'm amazed that something this bad is being put into testing. When KDE4 came along, it at least was fairly stable and usable (if incomplete) before it was moved to testing. If I wanted bleeding edge software that didn't necessarily work, I would be running sid or pulling stuff from experimental.On Wed, Sep 02, 2015 at 10:21:47AM -0400, Gary Dale wrote:I thought testing was supposed to be where packages were mainly working and the sid and experimental where were packages were tested to make sure they actually worked.Not really. "The testing distribution is generated automatically by taking packages from unstable if they satisfy certain criteria. Those criteria should ensure a good quality for packages within testing." [0] That doesn't guarantee the testing is usable at any single point of time, and the packages can even be temporarily removed from testing. This only guarantees that packages in testing are not RC-buggy and pass other technical checks. Packages in Debian are not "tested to make sure they actually worked" other than by the users. So, during large transitions both unstable and testing may be temporarily unusable. Users who want continuously working systems should use stable (or expect to make efforts to deal with problems that happen in testing and unstable). [0]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch04.en.html#sec-dists
As your quote says "Those criteria should ensure a good quality for packages within testing." Putting out a broken desktop can in no way be considered "good quality". I run testing because I want to test software, not to get mad at the developers who volunteer their time to get the packages ready for prime time. In this case the process seems to have misfired by bringing us the Plasma desktop when it is nowhere near ready.
This is the third time in the last few weeks that I've been forced to use Gnome because KDE couldn't do even basic desktop stuff. I suggest that testing should revert to KDE4, if that is possible, and wait until KDE5 achieves some level of stability before inflicting it on us again. Let the brave souls who run sid do what they, not I, signed up for.