Bug#113850: mhonarc: New upstream available
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> 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 is not a black-and-white view. With that argumentation, you are just
opening doors to abuses. I'm just talking about Quality Assurance,
there's nothing new.
I have at least two examples in mind:
- I was very happy with using Konqueror 2.1, it was stable then Ivan
Moore decided to ship beta versions of kde libs 2.2 and it suddenly
crashed and no more kde app could stay in memory more than 30 seconds.
- the current version of mp3blaster is a beta version and there are
regressions in functionalities since some features are missing but
were present in the previous version.
>
> 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.
It doesn't help in explaining people that Debian unstable does not mean
that applications are unstable but packaging may be unstable.
As I said before, there are many means of installing applications,
people can download the tarball and break there systems it they
want. When you distribute a beta version in debs, you have the
risk to get bloated by BTS bugs about an application you know not
to be fully debugged.
>
> 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.
I already contacted him some times ago and it seems he is no longer interested
in adopting it. As I'm packaging a mailing list manager which requires
mhonarc, I might adopt it.
--
Jérôme Marant <jerome@marant.org>
<jerome.marant@free.fr>
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