Re: Grades of stable-ness [was: GNOME --> potato: let's do it!]
Hi,
Please CC me since I am not on the list. Thanks!
On 30 Apr, James Mastros wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 1999 at 07:00:09PM -0500, Ossama Othman wrote:
> > Just because potato is unstable doesn't mean that we should just upload
> > things to it whenever something new comes along. I consider unstable
> > the "stable bleeding edge" distribution. Of course, things are going
> > to break but IMO we should make strong efforts to try to ensure that
> > things don't break, even though the distribution is considered
> > unstable. The stable distribution gets too old too fast, which is
> > probably why most of us like to run the unstable distribution.
> Hmm... Sounds like a job for... POLICY MANUAL! (Hmm, odd, policy-manual
> isn't packaged.) ... Time Passes ... Ahh, from the developer's-reference:
> 5.6.1: "Active development is done in the unstable distribution" ... " [T]he
> contents of this distribution change from day-to-day. Since no special
> effort is done to test this distribution, it is sometimes ``unstable.''
Nevertheless, what is wrong with trying to make sure things work
"reasonably" well before uploading? I realize that things _are_ going
to break when using the unstable distribution. All I am saying is that
efforts should be made to reduce the "breakage," which we already try
hard to do. The GNOME staging area was such an effort, i.e. to reduce as
much as possible potential instability in the Debian GNOME/GTK packages.
> I take this to mean that _active_, this-will-cause-breakage development
> should be in unstable. In My Very Humble Opinion, staging areas are somewhat
> cathedralish. (And I'm very bizarre, as anyone who knows me will tell you.)
Indeed. I'm a bit a of both. :-) Taking GNOME as an example again,
GNOME is still buggy but it works reasonably well. I couldn't even get
it to work before the staging area effort happened. IMHO, having
something in unstable that doesn't even work is just too unstable. The
staging area certainly helped in this case. Incidentally, no one was
prevented from using the staging area if they weren't involved with it.
Anyone could download and try the packages, and anyone could
contribute. We just used it make sure everyone's packages were
consistent with each other.
> > Note that I'm not trying to be adversarial. I'm just expressing my
> > opinions. Nothing personal Pedro. :-)
> Ditto, along with disclaimer: just-a-user,-not-(yet)-a-developer. I actually
> do have a constructive point to this.
Much appreciated.
> In any case, we all agree that the need for the staging area (whatever it
> is) is past.
Right. However, I think it is more accurate to say that the need to
keep the GNOME packages in the staging area is past. The staging area
itself could still be useful to improve stability in future Debian
GNOME package releases.
> (The following is the reason for possibly excessive quoting and cc/reply-to
> debian-policy. Sombody remind me again why I can't point to an archive of
> debian-gtk-gnome?)
No particular reason. We requested that debian-gtk-gnome be archived
when it first started. My guess is that the listmasters are overworked.
> this-will-break updates, leading to pre-releases (kernel) or staging areas
> (debian), both of which are poor work-arounds, seeing as the infrastructure
> is conspiculsouly absent (auto-builders, linux-kernel-announce,
> bugs.debian.org, etc.)
I see your point but I also don't think that's a fair statement to make.
Some real progress can be made with staging areas. That doesn't
necessarily mean that staging areas are the answer for everything. I
just think they can help where coordinating efforts is an issue.
-Ossama
--
Ossama Othman <othman@cs.wustl.edu>
Center for Distributed Object Computing, Washington University, St. Louis
58 60 1A E8 7A 66 F4 44 74 9F 3C D4 EF BF 35 88 1024/8A04D15D 1998/08/26
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