[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: RFS: GOPchop



On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 19:29 +0100, Erik Schanze wrote:

> > Firstly, the changelog in indicates that the package is for the
> > development version of gopchop, however, you should only upload
> > stable releases to debian unstable (development/cvs/svn/etc releases
> > generally go to experimental), 
> 
> Hehe, really? 
> # grep "^Version" /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.de.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages |grep -i cvs|wc -l
> 212

Disclaimer: What I've said below seems like common sense to me, but may
be wrong/stupid/conservative/whatever.

True, and at least one of those I maintain - mainly because it hasn't
seen a release in ages, and I inherited the package from the previous
maintainer, and I audited all the changes since the last package, and
they were all bug fixes. You also missed the ones with SVN/TLA/etc in
their version (a better test would be those that have a year in their
version no).

Packaging CVS snapshots can lead to the kind of situation we had with
mod_perl (IIRC) in sarge, a pre-release was packaged for unstable, and
it made it into sarge. Before upstream released it, they made some
changes and now sarge's mod_perl (IIRC) is incompatible with the
mod_perl used elsewhere. I'm probably remembering which package had the
incompatibility wrong, it had something to do with apache/2 though.

Basically it comes down to the probability of introducing bugs,
incompatibilities or security problems versus the new features a release
gives. For example, taking CVS/SVN snapshots of a post-release
stabilisation branch is always good, usually those contain only bug
fixes, but packaging gnome 2.13 or linux 2.5 probably isn't a good idea.

So, in my opinion, if you are packaging stuff that should not be in a
stable release, upload to experimental, or at the very least add a
blocking bug to it so it doesn't migrate to testing. I also see a lot of
uploads to experimental for new upstream stable releases, and then calls
for testing on debian-devel.

John, as part of upstream of gopchop, you are in the best position to
decide which way to go with this, so if you are comfortable with 1.1.7
being used by users for the expected 1.5-2 years of etch's lifetime
(assuming the same expected life as sarge), by all means get it uploaded
to unstable.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part


Reply to: