Re: Reproducibility
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 03:23:42PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 09:30:16AM -0300, David Bremner wrote:
> > > Yes, that's the problem.
> >
> > For stable releases though, we have the time, and we can (I suspect) get
> > the compute cycles to run heavy regression tests. Would that be a
> > worthwhile project?
>
> Well, it is not me who raised this problem and so I do not feel realy
> able to give a definite answer. But as I understood the people at
> Sanger scientist do not really care about stable Debian. They care
> about a really specific version of a specific software. Perhaps the
> version in stable is to old - or it might even be to new (if they want
> to reproduce old results). I really dobt that these people who are
> used to stick to such a version will care about Debians regression
> tests if they have the chance to simply install their own version.
Right.
Usually we have some version in stable and some people will use it. In
general, however, people want the stable 'operating system' and _in
addition_ a multitude of versions of their critical applications. In
Debian we have the universal operating system that incorporates all
software and 'stable' is a snapshot of everything at the time of release
-- and this is not what scientists want.
That is why we have backports.org and neuro.debian.net that offer at
least the latest and greatest for 'stable'. But this is still not
enough. Ideally, I would keep maintaining each an every package version
for an indefinite period of time -- that should make everybody happy,
but I'm clearly not going to do this unless my day gets additional 24
hours ;-)
BUT: I believe people would be a lot more happy to keep upgrading to
latest versions, IF there would be a standardized, upstream-supported
method to perform some reasonable tests.
This is a topic that Yarik stripped from his talk, but is still very
interesting to talk about: We, as Debian, could to a lot to help upstream
projects to deploy their software in a more sane way, by offering
concrete guidelines and facilities to do what is necessary to ensure
proper behavior.
IMHO, sticking to old versions is a reality in the science community --
but it is a problem that should be solved and not supported.
Michael
--
GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de
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