Re: Woody vs. Sarge vs. You've heard this before ;-)
On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 12:14:37PM -0400, David Z Maze wrote:
> "Jacob Anawalt" <jacob@cachevalley.com> writes:
> > The fact that I hear it said so much re-confirms to me that the labels
> > testing and unstable (unless you like adventure) and possibly the
> > writeup on the debian site lead the masses to expect something
> > different than what they get.
>
> Testing is still a comparatively young concept for Debian. For the
> woody release, it seemed to work fairly well. At this point, the
> canonical problem we've run into looks something like this: package A
> depends on package base (= 1). Base is upgraded to version 2.
> Packages B through Z update and now require base (>= 2), but A
> doesn't. The way the testing rules work, base can't be updated, since
> that would break A's dependency, but that means that none of B through
> Z can be updated either. The solutions are either "wait forever" or
> "intentionally break A", and the testing czars have gone with the
> latter option as of late, with the result that testing is closer to
> current but not necessarily useful on its own.
There's a third solution, which is "wait until everything's ready and
then give the testing scripts a hint that they can update A to Z all at
once", which is used quite often. It's difficult (not impossible, but
difficult) for large groups of packages, though.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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