Re: Why is subversion 1.1 remaining in experimental?
> Unfortunately, I didn't get any meaningful reply - so I thought I would ask
> you as the package maintainer directly.
sure, actually, I've gotten asked this a number of times. I wrote a
response to subversion@packages.debian.org a while back, I have
included that here. I'm happy to talk about the issue and nothing is
set in stone, my thoughts follow:
-- begin forwarded message --
Hi,
> Sorry if this is a question you get often.. I'm just wondering why the
> choice was made to put the 1.1.x versions into "experimental" (I'd never
> heard of experimental actually until I looked at the subversion package
> info) and not into "unstable".. My understanding was that the 1.1.x line
It isn't about subversion 1.1 being unstable or experimental. I'd
really like to upload 1.1 but don't feel it would be in the best
interest on Debian users. Debian is in the process of releasing
sarge. If I update to subversion 1.1 now then in addition to needing
to test subverison 1.1 itself all the packages that depend on
subversion:
websvn viewcvs trac svn-buildpackage esvn cvs2svn libsvn-mirror-perl
svk libsvn-simple-perl rapidsvn viewcvs trac
will need to be rebuilt/retested and generally verified to work. Many
of them will just work without hassle, but small problems take time to
fix. The time spent fixing these packages and making sure everything
is built on all archs needs to come from somewhere and it will come
from people who would otherwise be working to get sarge out. That
will make it take longer to release sarge or else some of these
packages won't make it in to sarge.
> then at what time in the future is the 1.1.x line expected to be
> submitted to "unstable"?
Once sarge is released I plan on uploading 1.1 to unstable. I don't
see a compelling reason to do it before that. I'm open to discusing
this issue, which is why I have cc'd subversion@packages.debian.org.
Having subversion in experimental isn't really all that bad. The 1.1
source package should compile even on a woody system, with some work
(and any necessary patches I'd be happy to incorporate into the source
package). Some enterprising individual could get the 1.1 package up
on backports.org and I expect a lot of people would be happy to have
it available. I have considered making subversion1.1 packages so that
the two versions could exist together but that is a gamble, and the
packages depending on subversion would need to choose either
subversion or subversion1.1 and hope that it was the right choice.
-David
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