Bug#113850: mhonarc: New upstream available
On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 11:40:43AM +0200, J?r?me Marant wrote:
> Jeff Breidenbach <jeff@jab.org> writes:
> > I think Debian can very reasonably go either way; package 2.5.0b2 or
> > wait for 2.5.0. I guesstimate Earl will release 2.5.0 before 2002.
>
> In any case, waiting for the stable release seems to me the more
> reasonnable thing to do and moreover should be a guideline for
> every debian developer (yeah I could give names of some people
> who screwed things up when shipping beta versions).
I think that's a very black-and-white view. Some things are less safe in
beta than others: libraries are the standard example. On the other hand,
I doubt that anyone cares that trn4, say, is still in beta; in practice
it's probably never going to get a stable release due to development
being stagnant, but I'd take it over the stable trn (3.6) any day.
It's clearly a judgement call for the maintainer. If a piece of beta
software is in practice stable, in particular if it's a significant
improvement even now over the previous stable release, and if there's
going to be enough time to fix any unexpected problems that might occur
before Debian's next stable release, then it's reasonable to package it.
We should be fairly conservative about the possibility of breaking
people's systems, certainly, but on the other hand if something is
believed to be pretty safe then packaging it for unstable before it's
officially released might mean we can help upstream catch a few more
bugs earlier, which is good for the community.
Davide Salvetti offered to adopt mhonarc last October. I e-mailed him
about it in early August and never got a response, so I think I'll
change its state back to orphaned and see if anybody else is interested
in it.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: