Re: On Mozilla-* updates

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl> writes:

> On Thursday 04 August 2005 00:39, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>> Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl> writes:
>> > On Thursday 04 August 2005 00:25, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>> >> What is wrong with volatile?  It's for exactly this case.
>> >
>> > No it is not. volatile-sloppy [1] may be (if that's implemented).
>>
>> I read that, and I read more importantly volatile.debian.net, and I
>> don't see any indication there of why gaim upgrades (or mozilla ones)
>> are not allowed in volatile.
>
> From volatile.debian.net:
>   volatile is not "just another place" for backports, but should only
>   contain changes to stable programs that are necessary to keep them
>           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   functional;
>
> Changes to stable programs <> new upstream versions (in principle).

I'm not sure I understand this.  In the case of gaim, it's in fact
specifically necessary to "keep it functional": you can't connect to
yahoo IM once the protocol's been changed.  This is even worse than
the virus scanner problem, where at least you can continue to detect
old viruses with the old definitions.

> As a rule, only changes to data files are accepted. Packaging changes are 
> also not acceptable in principle.

Nothing about the documentation suggests this, and when I advocated
for volatile.debian.org, it was not with such tight restrictions.  At
least the documentation should describe the *actual* criteria.