Re: Patched sendmail? testing?

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:53:16AM -0500, stan wrote:
> Is it possible that some mechanisim could be set up such that a package
> which has recieved a security related update in stable, could become the
> latest package for testing?
> 
> I'm trying to think of a way to leverage the fact the security issues _are_
> being addressed in stable into the testing regim.
> 
> Perhpas someone who understands the Debian packagin system better than I
> could comment on whether this makes sense or not?

Wouldn't work, for reasons not particularly related to the packaging
system itself.

Consider:

Right now, the current stable version of exim is 3.35.  The current
testing version of exim is 3.36.  exim 3.36 may or may not
incorporate features which are not present in version 3.35.  If it
does and if the packaging system were to declare a security-patched
3.35 to be more current than testing's 3.36, any sites which run
testing and use those features will break.

Your idea could probably work if stable and testing are both based on
the same upstream revision (although I wouldn't be terribly surprised
to find that there are cases where it still wouldn't), but it would
definitely be likely to cause problems when testing has a more recent
upstream version than stable.

-- 
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
  - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)