Re: dselect is a liar
Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 06:45:38PM +1000, Bruce@plato.debian.org wrote:
> > after a fresh update each time, dselect is adamant that lyx is current at
> > version 1.1.4-3 which is older than the current stable version...
> >
> > http://packages.debian.org/stable/text/lyx.htm advertises version 1.1.4-7
> > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/lyx.htm advertises 1.1.6fix3-1
> >
> > I'm confused!
> > Might this have something to do with either my architecture (powerpc)
> > or my isp?
>
> At the moment, packages.debian.org quotes versions for i386 only. Here's
> some more accurate information:
>
> [cjwatson@auric ~]$ madison lyx
> lyx | 1.1.4-3 | stable | powerpc
> lyx | 1.1.4-7 | stable | source, alpha, i386, m68k
> So lyx is indeed out of date on powerpc, probably because it's in the
> contrib section and the autobuilders don't always keep religiously up to
> date with that.
As a maintainer of several contrib packages that depend on XForms, I can
say that autobuilders _don't_ process contrib at all. I've had to ask
admins to temporarily install libforms-dev so that I could build the
packages on non-i386 arches; some of them don't want to. I've had to file
many bugs against ftp.debian.org to get old versions of non-i386 binary
packages deleted from the archive to let packages migrate to testing. It a
big pain. Maintaining a contrib package is more work than maintaining a
non-free one! I don't recommend it.
Hopefully, this will end soon. XForms is _supposed_ to become free very
soon. Then lyx will be in main too, and powerpc will be uptodate.
Peter
Reply to: