Re: Please allow latest qtl to be part of lenny

[Steffen Moeller <steffen_moeller@gmx.de>]

Hi Luk,

Luk Claes wrote:
> Steffen Moeller wrote:
>> === qtl:
>> = No migration to testing for 27 days.
>>   See <http://release.debian.org/migration/testing.pl?package=qtl>
>>
>> It has a series of important fixes and particularly to the scientists,
>> the core QTL user group, the outdated version would be mostly useless.
> 
> 88 files changed, 3174 insertions(+), 494 deletions(-)
> 
> Sorry, too much to review, not unblocked. If an outdated version is not
> really useful, it might be better to not include the package into a
> stable release and provide backports?

Hm. Interesting thought. I don't want to invest extra time over the regular
maintenance of the package, which excludes the backports route to my
understanding. Real scientists use testing or unstable anyway, I tend to say,
for exactly this reason. R/qtl is at the brink of current scientific
developments. So maybe you are right in suggesting to remove anything
that is intrinsically not stable from stable. Maybe it should go into
volatile, instead.

Wether you call it backports or volatile, you are suggesting to split
Debian-Med and Debian-Science from the main distribution, something that
we are all strongly working against, in order to strengthen the distribution
as a whole. I am CCing to Debian-Med to hear what they say. My personal opinion
is to just go for it because it is where the field is. Should the field be doing
crap, then so be it, it is not Debian's fault. Since R-qtl is an R package,
it cannot do any damage to Debian as a whole and render stable unstable
in any way.

Cheers,

Steffen