Re: Broken Debian's testing migration (grave bug in module-init-tools)
On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:07:08 -0400 (EDT), Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2010-04-12 11:19 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> There's something broken in the design of Debian's migration to testing.
>>
>> A grave bug in the testing version of module-init-tools (3.12~pre2-1)
>> was fixed several weeks ago, and the package was uploaded with
>> urgency=high:
>>
>> module-init-tools (3.12~pre2-2) unstable; urgency=high
>>
>> * Fixed an init scripts dependency loop introduced in -1. (Closes: #574535)
>>
>> -- Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it> Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:21:18 +0100
>>
>> but it hasn't migrated to testing yet!
>>
>> The reason is a build failure on HPPA:
>>
>> https://buildd.debian.org/build.php?arch=hppa&pkg=module-init-tools&ver=3.12~pre2-2
>>
>> Isn't it unacceptable that a problem on some platform blocks a fix
>> for a grave bug?
>
> This may not be acceptable for testing users, but the rules are pretty
> clear: all release architectures must be in sync in testing. This often
> holds up important fixes for months.
>
> The conclusion I had drawn from this long ago: don't use testing, it is
> only meant to be a staging area for preparing the next release and not
> as a distribution actually to be used by people, except during freezes
> maybe.
>
> Use stable or unstable instead, or a mixed testing/unstable system where
> you upgrade packages that are broken in testing from unstable.
As a user of one of the non-x86-derivative architectures (s390) I am
grateful for this rule. This rule is often the only thing that motivates
package maintainers to fix the problem on my architecture. Many package
maintainers seem to have the attitude of "Who cares that it doesn't build
on s390? Nobody uses s390 anyway." But some people do, such as yours
truly. And I care. And that rule forces the package maintainer to fix
the build problem on s390. I am also subscribed to the debian-s390 list,
and the package maintainers sometimes post on that list saying, in effect,
"how can I fix this build problem?" And sometimes, I've been able to
help them.
--
.''`. Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com>
: :' :
`. `'`
`-
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