Re: packaging policy questions re new standard
Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo@debian.org> writes:
> Yes, as far as I'm concerned we're to use the recommended versioning
> scheme with all the advantages of multiple version installed at the
> same time you mentioned. Also we're supporting your hybrid setup for
> packages where it makes more (practical) sense to do so. Versioning
> is fine, but if it becomes a hassle then by all means don't use it.
> This I leave to the judgement of the package maintainers. If in the
> future it makes us incompatible wit other distro's (and the LSB)
> then we can always drop it and allow only versioned directories.
> We're only at the beginning of the new setup and I don't mind playing
> around with both schemes to see how things work out.
As I said before, I don't mind versioned directories, but I object to
versioning the packages -- at least, one package for every minor
version seems idiotic.
I can understand, say, a version of docbook DTDs for major versions,
such a 3.x, 4.x, etc. I cannot see why it makes sense for
docbook-xsl-stylesheets. So what, there are different bugs in
different versions. This stuff isn't very stable yet! Is that any
good reason to promote the endless bloat of one package for every
minor version of a package? Users can put packages on hold if they
want to stick with a particular version.
It seems like that notion is contrary to the Debian way. I defy you
to point to *one* other package in debian which has a new version for
every minor update of the software. There isn't any.
I beg you to keep in mind how difficult it is to actually remove
packges from Debian. Suppose you decide that 1.40 is a really good
stable version, and that use of the older 1.29 version is no longer
needed. So you want the archive maintainer to delete the old
versions. Fine -- but there are 11 of them by now. And it takes
around a year for the archive maintainers to get to that. By then,
there are 40 versions or more.
I ask again: do we really want docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.29,
docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.30, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.31,
docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.32, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.33 in Debian?
I really feel strongly about the stupidity of this. If you guys
*still* think we need to do this (versioned packages for every minor
update), we need to get archive maitnainer approval since they may
reject the scheme.
> About the upgrades, that' a good question. To be honest I've no idea
> whether that's useful. I can imagine that users don't care about what
> version they're running as long as it works, but I've no idea that's
> what docbook users do as normal practice. This is probably also one
> of those things we're to see how it works out.
This is precisely why we shoudln't have another packge name for every
minor version.
To restate -- I am *not* against versioning for major verisons, such
as the docbook DTD 3.1, 4.0, 4.1, or something. This makes good
compatability sense. But to do that for the stylesheets, when poeple
aren't addressing stylesheet FPIs directly with versions, makes little
to no sense. Perl 5.006, perl 5.005, is another example. But we
don't have versioned perl directories for every minor release
(5.005_03, etc).
That doesn't mean we couldn't have the versioned
/usr/share/sgml/... directory however, and a symlink to that. It jsut
means there would only be 1 installed at any given time.
People may object:
Well, verison 1.29 works for document X, and 1.30 works for
document Y, so I need both.
I would counter that this means the upstream version is unstable and
buggy and people should work with the upstream maintaint to get the
software to be more robust.
Consider another problem. Suppoes you find a bug in your maintainer
scripts which has been around for a while. Suddenly you'll have to
fix and re-upload X differernt copies of docbook-xsl-stylesheets!
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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