Bug#90511: proposal] addressing objections (re: disallow multi-distribution uploads)
On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 08:22:40AM +1100, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 04:10:20PM -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> >
> > Yes it does help. By allowing stable/unstable uploads, we implicitly
> > allow maintainers to do something potentially harmful and with almost
> > zero technical gain. By disallowing it, we raise awareness that it is
> > most commonly not a good idea.
>
> IMHO you can't solve social problems with technial solutions.
Sorry, but allowing stable/unstable uploads is not a social problem, it
is a technical one.
> > Testing libc6 backward compatibility is not the purpose of
> > stable/unstable uploads. That is something that needs to be tested
>
> But it is a side effect for packages depending on libc6.
And side affects are often bad, as they have unforseen problems.
> > elsewhere. Allowing stable/unstable uploads does not guarantee any of
> > this, and is a bad way to test it. For example, many packages should be
> > using new interfaces in libc6 for LFS, and not using the db libraries
> > that were obsoleted. Compiling against potato increases the lack of LFS
> > support in our unstable distribution, and increases the use of obsoleted
> > parts of libc6. Neither of these things are technically meritable.
>
> As I have said many times already, this is a *different* problem.
>
> If a package can benefit from LFS and it hasn't been built with LFS, file a
> bug report. If a package uses obsolete db packages, file a bug report.
>
> Disallowing "stable unstable" uploads will *not* solve this problem.
But a maintainer may not know about this, and this is just speaking of
libc6. There are many packages that may configure to use newer
interfaces in libraries in unstable, that are not done when compiled
against stable. Yes bug reports can do this. However, when you upload a
package built against stable, the buildd's use unstable, so now you have
feature skew across architectures. That is a bad thing.
Also, we want our latest features to be tested. Compiling against stable
does not do this, so we have less testing on the things that matter for
the next release.
> > You still have not given any technical merit to allowing stable/unstable
> > uploads other than convenience, which is not on my list of technical
> > terms.
>
> Obviously you disagree with me about what is a technical merit. IMHO,
> testing ABI compatibility of libraries like libc6 is aa technical merit.
But it is not one that should be solved by allowing stable/unstable
uploads. If you want to do that, just upload to unstable (which is bad,
as I have already noted above).
> In any case, I don't see why we should be discussing what technical merits
> there are in these uploads, but what technical merits exist in disallowing
> them as I haven't seen any of those which are valid either.
I've already covered those, but you have blown them all off. I don't see
how you can argue against them. Those problems exist for a majority of
the uploads that would be done for stable/unstable. Just because the
problems don't affect a few possibilities, does not give merit to
allowing such things, it just means they don't have problems. Nothing
good comes from doing a stable/unstable upload.
Ben
--
-----------=======-=-======-=========-----------=====------------=-=------
/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bcollins@linux.com '
`---=========------=======-------------=-=-----=-===-======-------=--=---'
Reply to: