Re: chromium not in Squeeze: a bit of communication needed?
On 14/09/2010 22:14, Giuseppe Iuculano wrote:
> On 09/14/2010 05:56 PM, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
>> Besides, Giuseppe said that Chromium 5.x wasn't an option for Squeeze
>> and uploaded Chromium 6.x. Why this won't happen again during the
>> freeze? or worst, during Squeeze's lifetime?
>
> As I wrote many times, no one can say if this will happen again.
Well… I do (maybe). We can have an estimate by looking at the release
dates of chromium.
(Some parts of my mail have been already mentioned elsewhere but
repetition never hurts)
By looking at the Chromium Development Calendar and Release Info page [1]
and their Google Chrome Releases [2], one can see that:
- 3.x and 4.x branches were stable only for 4 months.
- 5.x was stable only for 3 months.
- 6.x was released two weeks ago (approx.)
- 7.x will be released in 3 months (according to their release chart).
[1] http://dev.chromium.org/developers/calendar
[2] http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/
The jump from 5.x to 6.x was quite big and led us to drop 5.x and replace
it by 6.x because 5.x wasn't fixable. It will be the same case for 6.x
with the 7.x update (or 8.x, or 9.x… because these will be released quite
soon as well).
I think it's easy to see if we will have to accept a new major release of
Chromium in Squeeze (after its release): Would you be able to backport any
fix from 6.x to 3.x? If they keep releasing every 3 months, you'll have to
deal with a more distant release.
Their official blog [3] has an interesting post about how they plan to
release future stable versions. And, quite frankly, it doesn't look brilliant.
[3] http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often.html
Furthermore, I don't see any page speaking about support of former stable
releases. So, I assume there is none. The newest is always the only one
“supported”.
If we consider accepting Chromium in Squeeze, we should be ready to
accept new big dumps of Chromium (not only bugfixes… because, that's
not how they used to release) without even looking at the diff. If we do
so, we should leave a remark about how the security support and updates
are handled for Chromium in Squeeze in the Release Notes (stating clearly
that Chromium is an exception and why). If we're going to EOL Chromium
during Squeeze's lifecycle (and I believe it will happen quite soon), then
why should we accept it in Squeeze at all?
I also saw some arguments to treat some packages as exceptions
Based on the above dates and facts, I think that it's makes more sense to
have Chromium in backports it may need quite frequent "big" updates during
the lifecycle of Squeeze. That also needs Backports FTP-masters to make an
exception for Chromium if it's not present in Squeeze.
I'm also a Chromium user and I'd really appreciate to see it in a stable
release. But really, I wasn't able to find any valid reason for having it
in stable. It can't be properly maintained unless we accept dumps from
time to time. But hey, that's not how stable works (imo).
Regards,
--
Mehdi Dogguy مهدي الدڤي
mehdi@{dogguy.org,debian.org}
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