Re: Plasma desktop unusable in stretch

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Accidentally send off list.

Am Donnerstag, 3. September 2015, 16:24:40 schrieb Gary Dale:
> On 03/09/15 03:42 PM, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 03:03:35PM -0400, Gary Dale wrote:
> >> Sorry, but before releasing a major package to "testing", shouldn't it be
> >> tested against the "testing" environment?
> > 
> > No, we don't do this.
> 
> Obviously, but the question was "shouldn't you?"

Thing is:

Many of the issues were *transitional*.

And as far as I know the exact order in which packages appear in testing is 
basically unpredictable, it is also quite unpredictable what problems can 
appear in testing. It could also be problems, that didn´t appear in unstable 
at all due to a different order of appearance of packages in the archive.

Also I am not sure whether RC bugs are really a good way to get a stable 
transition for testing user. I bet it is not, cause a RC bug only stops one 
package, and maybe its dependencies, but… KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 are 
several hundred packages.

So what would be needed is to prepare the migration completely separated from 
unstable, say in some PPA, *without* hindering the other package uploads too 
much. And then find a way to put all of these new packages into unstable at 
once and then into testing at once.

I do not think that such an infrastructure  for Debian is already in place. 
PPAs are being worked on, and they will likely come. But atomic transitions of 
several hundred packages from a PPA into unstable and then testing without 
messing things up? Probably a challenging task.

And also that said: This g++ ABI transition is one of the biggest transition I 
have ever seen. A member of the Qt/KDE team said to me that the last 
transition that big he remembers, was about 10 years ago.

So it is not that this is happing every year or so.

The transition is challenging. From what I see the Debian Qt/KDE team does a 
*marvellous* job. I try to help with bug triaging here and there. And on 
DebConf 2015 I experienced myself the amount of work needed to fix up those 
symbol files in the packages for the transition. I did it manually and someone 
more experienced can likely do it much faster, but thing is: It is still work.

So members of the Debian Qt/KDE team, I am now also one, work, usually in 
their free time, unpaid, on delivering a new Plasma version to all of you.

They do a marvellous job and that in my eyes deserves a huge big "Thank you!" 
instead of bashing on them. I have met people of the team on DebConf and they 
work on the stuff with best intentions. Its not that they plan new creative 
ways on how to break the desktop experience for you.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin