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Re: apt for jessie



Hello,

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 07:11:35PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> On 17/10/14 19:56, Michael Vogt wrote:
> >we - the APT team - would like to ask for permission for a transition,
> >namily of the apt version as found in experimental to unstable with
> >the target of reaching jessie.
[…]
> I think it's too late for this.

I thought this for a while, too, actually, but I tend to consider
(devil's advocate style) the alternative now to be far worse:

Not having this rewrite in jessie, means that we will have it very early
in jessie+1. Given the teamsize it is unlikely that we will have much
time/energy to "search, locate and destroy" (security) bugs in the then
outdated jessie code, in other words: We will have a horrible mess of
unmaintained code for another 3 (+ maybe LTS) years running as root on
all Debian (and derivatives) machines. That scared me so much, that I
pondered about how hard it would be to do all this without an ABI break
and it is potentially possible, but would mean that the fixes are
apt-get only, which doesn't look too good either in my book and
was hence quickly discarded. [0]

The regression potential feels in comparison a lot more manageable as
the changes have an immediate effect (unlike resolver/ordering changes,
which have their biggest effect at the time stable+1 is stable), it
is now easily the most covered codearea by our testcases and a bunch of
testers in experimental have helped us cover previously dark spots over
the last (for some changes) months already.


Note: This isn't intended as blackmail, but my/our honest opinion to
give you guys the full picture so you can make the call. Whatever you
will decide will be what it is and we will make it work one way or
another I am sure. We know we are asking for a lot here, so we aren't
running to our rooms screaming never to be seen again because daddy
didn't bought our new toy – we will run crying into mammies arms. ;)

So, that being said:
Please please please daddy, please pretty please with sugar on top!
(picture the sweet 16th year old apt with big wet eyes saying that)


Best regards

David Kalnischkies


[0] I don't want to sound bitter or throw dirt, but it feels kinda ironic
that apt is punished for providing a workinprogress shared library for
its dependencies while other tools do not to be more free in what they
can do, while being a pain for their dependencies in return… :/

P.S.: Just to underline how serious I am about that: if it helps
our cause I would even be willing to sign the "secret supplementary
protocol" 'people' suggested earlier this month in #d-apt …

P.P.S.: Thanks for keeping us CC'ed, we actually forgot to ask for it…
So please keep it that way please (pretty please with sugar on top).

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