Re: how to deal with widely used packages unsuitable for stable (was Re: [Git][security-tracker-team/security-tracker][master] Add radare2 to dla-needed.txt with comments.)

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, 30 Aug 2019, Pirate Praveen wrote:
> Fast Track repo works exactly like current backports except the packages
> are added from unstable (or experimental during transitions and freeze)
> as they cannot go to testing and hence to current backports.
> 
> As Paul noted earlier, backports team is not interested to change
> current backports criteria.

Can you point us the discussion where this got refused?

Honestly I don't like the idea of using an external service. I would like
my unstable package to migrate automatically to this new testing sibling
repository and I would like britney to control this move to ensure
consistency.

So if <testing-codename>-backports (unused at the time where this would be useful
for this service!) can't be used we could find another name... but for
me it's important that it's on the main mirror and that it's controlled
by the same britney instance to ensure consistency with the main
repository.

Ideally it would be managed by the release team as a by-product of their
work on preparing the next stable release.

Or maybe we can switch the logic around. britney generates a new "rolling"
suite which includes all packages and afterwards we generate "testing" as
a subset of rolling by excluding the packages which are not supported in
stable and all their reverse dependencies. That would be even better in my
opinion.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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