New policies?
Dear developers,
I hope, this might be the right list, to start a new discussion. Additionally
this also should read developers and ftp-masters, as theire word has great
weight.
Well, I want to like to suggest, to slightly change the policy for
debian/stable. Please let me explain. In the past years I am using debian (now
for more than 8 years), there always was a problem with debian/stable whenever
things changed, and new versions of applications or libs were not allowed to
enter in stable. Doing so, all people using stable were not able to use theire
programms before, as things changed. Among a lot of examples, just let me pick
one to explain, I choose "Pidgin" (kopete, as well)
As yahoo and ICQ protocols were changed, pidgin was released in a new version
with new libs. Everything went fine for testing and unstable users, but stable
users could not use pidgin or kopete any more.
Such things happen and will happen in our fast changing times again and again,
and IMO especially stable-users want a system that is running stable. But
debian policy is causing more trouble than expected.
I also think, that major changes in applications (here are especially kde,
gnome, Openoffice.org in my mind) should also beeing transferred to
debian/stable when they are running stable enough or the current versions are
out-of-state-of-the-art. Mentioning KDE (just as an example), IMO 2 years of
waiting is a likttle bit too long, as a) every distribution has already KDE4
since a long time, b) KDE4 was running for a long, long time very stable and
c) KDE3 was already for a long long time much obsolete. (the same things are
at OpenOffice.org-2.4.1 from stable- obsolete, unmodern, bad usable due to
obsolete/worse import/export filters)
Please try to understand my extensions (and do not blame me, I am using
testing for myself), but I think stable-users should not to be forced to
choose between obsolete/not working applications or update the whole system.
There should be better way (without dealing with apt-pinning or similar), my
idea and suggestion is, just to transfer necessary newer versions (and hand-
picked) of libs and applications to stable. But that would require the change
of the debian policies (and of course the agreement of users, developers and
ftp-masters).
I will be pleased if my suggestion is worth to start a discussion of it.
Thank you very much for reading this and all the work in the best distribution
ever.
Happy hacking!
Hans-J. Ullrich
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