Bug#622371: transition: webkit

[Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com>]

Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:

> > > On 04/13/2011 01:40 AM, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> > > >> I plan to upload webkit 1.3.x (soon to be 1.4.0) to unstable.
> > What
> > > >> this involves:
> > > >
> > > > I would prefer to stick with 1.2.x for the time being
> > > 
> > > Until when?
> > 
> > Sometime between December this year and Feb 2012 (or until the
> > complaining gets too noisy).
> 
> That won't be possible. Doing that would severely restrict our ability
> to progress in pushing GNOME3 down to unstable - Empathy, Epiphany,
> Devhelp and whatnot need this version of WebKit. 

Those are leafy gnome apps.  I wonder if there is any real harm in
holding them back for a while?

> It would also severly
> limit the exposure of newer webkit versions to user testing and
> development (the very reason for unstable/testing).

Right now, that is just a guess.  It may very well be that quality will
not suffer at all since webkit is going to get testing in various other
distros and via experimental anyway.

We'd need to try the experiment first to say for sure whether or not
this is a real problem to be concerned about.

> I understand your concern about security support, but I think holding
> webkit in experimental for almost a year just because we want
> stable-quality security support for testing makes no sense at all, so
> let's please stick to my request =). 

There is a push to make testing constantly usable, and I think
security support is a very important aspect of that.  If webkit only
had a couple issues a year, then this wouldn't be necessary, but since
it has over 100 per year, its pretty much impossible to support two
versions.  Actually, it's almost impossible to support one version.

> The "staging" of packages that
> require the newer webkit on experimental has already happened, and it's
> now time to push them to unstable.

I don't see the urgency.  Testing has a two year development window.
Even a year is a rather long time.  Why do we need to have this in for
almost two years?

Best wishes,
Mike