Dale has asked me to forward this to debian-devel to get a wider response. ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 07:24:41 -0400 (EDT) From: Dale Scheetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Guy Maor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cc: debian-qa@lists.debian.org, debian-testing@lists.debian.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: How to handle updates to bo? Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I like your solution. It involves a minimal amount of change to procedure while putting adequate brakes and controles on the installation process. This works for me. On 5 Jun 1997, Guy Maor wrote: > How does the testing group want to handle updates to bo? > > The current method of foo, foo-fixed, and foo-updates is a pain to > administer and will be even more of a pain now that contrib and > non-free are released. I also do not think it has significant gains > now that most people use dpkg-ftp to keep their system up to date. > > There will be many packages going to bo without going to hamm because > I expect most developers will start migrating to libc6. That nixes > one solution of installing everything to unstable and moving packages > from unstable to stable once they have been tested. > > The simplest solution (for me anyway) is to update bo now that it is > called stable in a similiar fashion as was used when it was frozen: > > A developer produces a package earmarked for stable containing some > important fix. The developer will most likely be doing a special > compile just for stable using the altdev packages. > > dinstall checks for gross package errors, such as an md5sum mismatch > immediately, but does not install the package. (it already does > this.) > > Members of the testing group install the package out of Incoming. I > can easily arrange for debian-qa to receive an abbreviated copy of the > install report that dinstall already sends to Brian and myself. That > report would contain relevant information about all the packages > destined for stable that are currently in Incoming. > > The testing group decides the fate of the package and Brian invokes > dinstall to install or reject it. > > If the package is installed, dinstall places it directly into the bo > distribution and automatically updates the ChangeLog. Once a day, the > daily cron scripts update the Packages files. If they see that new > packages have been added to bo, they stamp the ChangeLog with the > version number and update the top-level version symlink. > > New versions of bo are thus created as fast the testing group wants to > create them. An important security fix can be installed immediately > forcing a version update. Fixes of lesser important can wait in > Incoming until enough of them are there to justify a new release. > > Comments, especially from Brian, please. > > > Guy > ------- End of forwarded message ------- I have since thought of one minor change. Rather than actually installing the package with dinstall, Brian can move it it to a special incoming directory and dinstall can install it in its daily run. This will eliminate the too-common problem of the Packages file not matching what is on the archive. Guy -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .