Bug#90511: proposal] disallow multi-distribution uploads
Remember that the majority of uploads to stable are done by the security
team and the buildd's. I don't think this is a lot of effort for the
maintainers, since it isn't done often enough to be cumbersome, like it
would have been for "frozen unstable" uploads.
On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 07:38:08PM +1100, Herbert Xu wrote:
> > It's my opinion that same version uploads to stable/unstable are harful
> > to archive and distribution integrity. I've talked this over with James
> > Troup, and he seems to agree with the points below, and is considering
> > enforcing them via dinstall checks. My intention is to get the weight
> > of policy behind this.
>
> I disagree. Allowing uploads to both stable and unstable reduces maintainer
> load, so that they can spend their precious time doing useful work rather
> than needlessly recompiling things.
Think of a base system. If things are allowed to continue this way, it
means the base system will be comprised of a lot of different versions
of the same library. That makes a base install larger
> > Technical reasoning:
>
> > 1) Building for "stable unstable" means that 99% of the time the build
> > is performed on a box running "stable". So the package will be compiled
> > against "stable" libraries. Now we all know that most of the major
> > libraries will go on to new major versions between releases. Ncurses (4
> > to 5 between slink and potato), readline (2 to 4 between slink and
> > potato), gnome (several revisions during potato development, and others
> > now), libstdc++ (which changes with the libc6 major upgrades), etc...
>
> > Now, a lot of libraries keep an oldlib around for backward compatibility
> > of packages that have not been recompiled for the newest version of the
> > lib. This is a less than optimal situation since it must be maintained
> > just like any other package. If libncurses4 is in stable, and
> > libncurses5 is in unstable (with the 4 version around only for backward
> > compat), then builds in unstable should be using the libncurses5.
> > However, someone compiling for "stable unstable" uneedingly prolongs
> > this oldlib's life.
>
> But you need to keep old libraries around anyway for compatibility with
> other Linux distributions. We're not the only Linux distribution here.
>
> In fact, having some unstable packages compiled on stable is a
> Good Thing (TM). It means that we actually test whether our libraries
> are lying when they claim to have kept their ABI intact (glibc would be
> a prime example). You won't be able to do this if everybody compiled their
> unstable packages against unstable.
>
> Of course, if a package doesn't compile on unstable, that would be a
> different matter, and a severity serious bug.
This isn't about keeping old libraries around. For one, people can
always get it from the old dist, or they will just keep it installed and
not remove it. This is about the libraries required by Debian packages
themselves. New uploads should always strive to be built agains the
latest packages, to reduce the dependency chain in the dist, and
increase integrity of the compile base.
--
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bcollins@linux.com '
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