Re: Please consider quantlib_0.3.9 (and -ruby,-python,-doc) for testing

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

Jeroen,

On 14 May 2005 at 15:40, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
| On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 08:12:54AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear. 0.1.11 is _broken_ as it needs QL 0.3.8.
| > Given that we settled on QL 0.3.9 we do need 0.1.12.  See below for a log.
| 
| Why isn't this reflected in the dependencies then? Dependencies are
| there to reflect which versions of packages work together with which
| other package's versions.

That is a fair and valid question.  However, in the ten years I have worked
as a maintainer, I have found that you need to strike a balance between what
is achievable technically with our infrastructure, and what makes sense in
practical terms. There can in fact be a difference: e.g. based on my fairly
extensive experience maintaining Octave -- a package that changed frequently
at times and required a rebuild of all external binary packages to reflect
the new version -- I am not convinced that "hard" are a perfect solution.
Too often something gets stuck and I then need to refer to ftpmaster or
release managers for hinting. I find this creates more trouble than it
solves. The hard depends on Octave lead to blocking more often than we liked.

But I welcome the release teams view on this. If you guys all state that I
should really have hard depends, I will change my mind on this. Feedback welcome!
 
| Why doesn't r-cran-rquantlib even depend on quantlib? According to the
| error you quoted, r-cran-rquantlib doesn't seem to work at all with a
| wrong quantlib version, I assume it wouldn't work either without any
| quantlib version?

Indeed, that is a bug. Not sure how that happened -- I guess I need to point
dh_shlibs to the binary.

The same problem may apply with other binary r-cran-* packages. Hm, spot
checking r-cran-r{pvm,mpi} shows that they are correct. I may have a bug in
linquantlib0-dev then ...

| > There is, it's just that nobody has a critical bug yet.
| 
| It's a bit hard to squash release critical issues if they aren't even
| filed as bugs, don't you think?

Sure, sure. But RQuantLib is a) not widely used and b) available from CRAN
via R's update.packages() command as well. So it's not worth haggling over at
great length.  I really appreciate Steve's no-nonsense approach to getting
QuantLib 0.3.9 into testing.  This package would add the final 2% to
completion; if it misses I can live with 98% coverage.

Hope this helps,  Dirk

-- 
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he 
predicted yesterday didn't happen today.  --  Laurence J. Peter