Re: re evolution

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 01:44:23PM +0100, Nikolay Kichukov wrote:
> hello,
> Just to make sure:
> Is the testing branch the one that comes after
> unstable, or is it the other way round?

Here's my understanding:

Packages are allegedly debugged (almost no one can *really* debug, as 
testified by security upgrades) and places into unstable/sid.  Since the 
developers mostly (I melieve) build and test their packages on 
unstable/sid, we can expect their declared  dependencies to be satisfied 
in sid.  But the packages are sometimes not fully debugged and sometimes 
just fail to work properly.  So the package manager will have little to 
complain about, but the user might.

> 
> I had many discussions with friends, and it seems
> noone can say for sure which is the most rapidly
> changing distro.
> 
> As far as I know, testing is not so oftenly changing,
> and the code is believed to be somehow more "stable"
> than the experimental unstable. That is why packages
> from testing are getting into stable after some time.
> 
> Then, why is it, very often, it happens to
> applications to totally "stuck" in the testing branch
> after dist-upgrade?
> 
> It happened with evolution now, and it has happened to
> other apps before.

Once packages look good enough, and all their dependencies do too, 
they are 
moved to testing.  So more debugging will have been done, and the users 
will have fewer conplaints.  But the dependencies (either what the 
package depends on or what other packages depend on it) may not all have 
been checked properly (after all, lots of stuff has different 
versions between testing and sid), so the package manager will have more 
complaints.

On occcasion, packages have been promoted to testing even though they 
were known to break dependencies.  This happened last fall in the 
transition to xorg and the new c library -- waiting until *every* 
obscure package had been recompiled and stabilized for testing would 
have unduly delayed the main sunsystems like KDE and gnome.  So I 
read on the mailing list, anyway.

Once in a blue moon or so, an entire distribution is deemed to be 
'stable', replacing the previous stable distribution.  This is 
apparently done by changing a few symbolic links in the package 
repositories, so no new incompatibilities arise within the distribution 
by making this change.  So the newly-deemed-stable distribition really 
remains stable.  But people who update their systems from 'stable' 
instead of from 'woody' or 'sarge' or 'etch' will find huge changes 
occuring at that time.
> 
> Thanks & Regards,
> -Nikolay Kichukov

You're welcome.
-- hendrik