Re: smail

[tony mancill <tony@mancill.com>]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2000, Josip Rodin wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 24, 2000 at 01:36:27AM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
> > > > If i386 smail isn't included when potato releases, literally millions of
> > > > boxes will be rather forcibly transitioned to a new MTA.
> > >
> > > No, they won't, they'll be left untouched. Or is there some kind of bug?
> > 
> > Good point, except ... if it doesn't have some kind of bug shouldn't
> > it be included?
> 
> It had some serious bug, that's why it was removed.

While this may be the case sometimes, it's not always so.  transproxy was
removed during the first round because of a typo in the init.d script - I
pleaded with Dark to let me take it over, but to no avail.  Now, I've got
a production environment that will upgrade to potato, but will have the
old transproxy until I build a package, set up a local apt source, and so
on.  This isn't tough, but it's beyond some of the admins I know.  It's
also a PITA.

Furthermore, now I have an old binary on my box.  Will it work with
potato's libc?  Maybe - maybe not.  If it doesn't, then we have, in
essence, created bugs by not removing it.  I went through this same crap
with Debian 1.3 to 2.0 upgrades - bit-rotted packages, but you don't know
that they're old because there's nothing to upgrade them too.

I propose that packages be assigned to QA (or somewhere) before they fall
off the face of the earth for RC bugs (especially like those in this case
- a typo in a script, or in the case of smail, for a segv while running
from inetd (who runs their MTA from inetd?) that can't be reproduced by
the maintainer).

Anyway, as Josip says, it's too late for this go-around, but in the future
it would be nice to prevent this "skipping generations" thing that occurs
now where a package is in slink, not in potato, but in woody because of
stuff like this.

  tony@mancill.com     | Under deadline pressure for the next week.
http://www.debian.org  | If you want something, it can wait.
                       | Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic...