Re: New field proposed, UUID
[Reimer, Fred - Wed, 29 Nov 2000 08:01:15 PM CST]
} > This is a common assumption and is wrong. The most popular
} > use of apt-get
} > source -b has been to make stable compiles of unstable
} > packages. Rather
} > than some source tweak.
}
} Why would they want to do this? I usually run a completely unstable system,
} that is rather stable BTW, so don't understand why someone who runs a stable
} system would want to "lie" about a package being stable when, in fact, it is
} unstable.
Unstable is not always "rather stable"; and lots of the packages in
unstable aren't there because they're unstable, they're there because
they're new versions, and new versions of non-vital packages do not get
incorporated into the stable release.
Two examples. Take a look at mutt 1.2.5, for instance; up until recently
(security or licensing fix, I forget which) only version 1.0.1 was
available for potato; however, mutt is far past that on the its own
stable releases (e.g., non-developmental/experimental). Also, look at
netsaint: potato has 0.0.5stable, but woody has 0.0.6stable, also not a
"developmental" or "unstable" piece of software.
(On the other hand, mozilla is now in potato, and that's not all that
"stable".)
Personally, I do not want to deal with things like XFree86 4.x and glibc
breakage on my users' workstations just to give them the newest version
of, say, slrn or mutt or vim or hell, even qt and kde. Or on the lab
machines where cle -- a fairly "stable" thing -- was built officially
with the new libc6, even though it doesn't need it. A rebuild on a
stable machine is valuable here; but cle isn't going to suddenly appear
in potato because it's a brand new package. Or on our servers, should
we need functionality in a newer version of, say, amanda or netsaint.
In summary, it's not stupid.
--
An Thi-Nguyen Le
|A hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong!
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