Hi all, we had some discussion about volatile, and I'm more and more considering to pick this task up. I think some issues are quite obvious:
- packages should only go in in cooperation with the maintainers; - volatile is not "just another place" for backports, but should only contain changes to stable programs that are necessary to keep them functional; - Good candidates are clamav (including spin-offs), spamassassin, chkrootkit; - It should allow any administrator to "just use" volatile, as they "just use" security.d.o, and they should be confident that nothing is broken by that; - for bugs, the normal debian bug tracking system should be used. Some things are not so obvious: - security support: There should be security support for volatile. However, security.d.o is probably not the right place for that, and adding another task to the security-team is IMHO also not the way to go. So, this needs to be placed on the burden of the volatile team. - "releases" of volatile: One could consider to seperate volatile into a release and a staging area. An advantage would be that system administrators would only need to update on some times. However, if we restrict volatile, only upload required changes and don't have more than 10 packages in it, we don't need that. - adding volatile packages to point releases: Though it may be seen as good idea to add volatile packages at the next point release, this is currently a no-go. I can see the good reasons for that, and I accept them. Two technical questions remain open for now, and needs to be solved independend of the policy questions above. - ftp-server: Should volatile be a "normal" part of the debian ftp-server, or be setup independently (like e.g. security.d.o is)? Normal part would of course be nicer for our users (and especially mirroring is free), but requires some more work initially. However, this decision is in the domain of the ftp-masters. - architectures/buildd support (partly connected with ftp-server): Which architectures should be supported? Perhaps starting with a smaller number is a good idea, and adding more if they can cope with the updates. I added http://volatile.debian.net/ to be a placeholder for the current discussions. Also, there is a archive present on http://volatile.debian.net/debian-volatile, so if maintainers want to start adding packages, they may contact me. That's all for now. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Cheers, Andi -- http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/ PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
