Great, you leave for two days and you are welcomed by another huge thread.. :( Anyway, I have a couple of comments based on what I've read so far: the major issue people have is that upgrading one bit of GNOME can mysteriously break seemingly unrelated others bits of GNOME, due to the horribly complex dependencies and not-always-changes-sonames. We also know why this happens: GNOME is still in alpha-stage. Developments happens horribly fast and what works today will very likely do something different in the near future. If you take a single snapshot though and stick with that you have no problems. For example take GNOME 0.30 in slink, which works great for me. Now we look at unstable, where we currently seem to have bits and pieces of 0.30, 0.99.x all thrown together. Of course we don't call it unstable for nothing. On the other hand the result seems to fall in the category of packages which are so unstable they should not be in main (policy, section 2.1.3) I think there are two possible solutions to this problem: * fool around with the mess of dependencies and conflicts to prevent things from breaking. (this seems to take so much work it is probably not worth the effort) * we tell our users to stop complaining and tell them to stick with stable or accept the mess (no way we'll get away with that) * make sure that we only have GNOME (and related) packages in the distribution which work together and put the other packages that break things somewhere else. Now if I remember things correctly Jim Pick and a group of other people were working on something called the Debian Snapshot Project. The name suggests that it might be just the way to implement the third solution mentioned above.. can someone who knows more about the status of that project tell us something more about it? Wichert. -- ============================================================================== This combination of bytes forms a message written to you by Wichert Akkerman. E-Mail: wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl WWW: http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/
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