Re: chromium not in Squeeze: a bit of communication needed?
On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 11:14:33 -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Michael Gilbert wrote:
> > I think that this need is justification to declare backports "officially
> > supported by the debian project". Thus when asked this question, you
> > can point to the fact that chromium is indeed supported on stable, just
> > via a different model than folks are used to.
>
> Do you really think that desktop users[1] should be expected to learn about
> backports, and manually configure them, and learn how to convince apt to
> install from them, in order to get the best web browser available[2]? If
> the preceding sounds simple, think again; you're suggesting that users
> have to either dig up some faq or forum post, or post to debian-user, just
> in order to get a good web browser.
A an option in the installer like volatile/security should address a
lot of this concern.
> If backports are really officially supported, and we encourage users to
> install a web browser from them, which is not available in stable, how
> is that truely different than shipping the same web browser in stable?
The difference is that there is no arduous backporting/dsa process to
push that update, and as an added benefit, it gets a ton of testing by
going through unstable/testing first. Plus, there is a subset of users
that want to always have the latest/greatest browser, and stable can
never meet that need.
> AFAICS the only difference is that only 10 to 25% [3] of users will find
> the web browser in backports, while some other percentage will
> install Ubuntu instead. The security team will still be left responsible
> for supporting the former users' systems.
Adding an option in the installer would significantly help
discoverability.
> (BTW, have you considered that apt does not automatically upgrade packages
> installed from backports? That the majority of documentation, including
> the documentation on wiki.debian.org, about installing flashplugin-nonfree
> from backports does not take this into account, and will leave the user with
> a never-upgraded package?)
Maybe the decision about backports priority should be reconsidered?
Give it an appropriately higher priority due to its "official" nature
now.
Best wishes,
Mike
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