On 04/05/11 at 14:24 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Hi, > > during the recent discussions about rolling, a proposal was made in a > blog comment, and after giving it some quick thoughts, most people I’ve > talked with seem to think it is a good idea, so it’s time for it to be > discussed at large. > > It starts from the following fact: if you want a testing system that > works correctly, you usually have to add APT lines for unstable, while > pinning them to only install specific packages you need to unbreak > what’s broken in unstable. > > The idea is to make this process automatic. Let me elaborate. > > The new “rolling” suite > ----------------------- > This would be a pseudo-suite, like experimental. Except that while > experimental is built on top of unstable and filled manually by > maintainers, rolling would be built on top of testing and filled > semi-automatically. A rolling system would have typically 2 APT lines: > one for testing and one for rolling. > > The rolling suite would only exist for a subset of architectures (we > could start with powerpc, i386 and amd64), generated by picking up > packages from unstable. Typically it would be generated from an override > file that looks like: > source-package version > xserver-xorg-video-ati 1.2.3-4 > ... > The rolling suite would try to have a package that has *at least* this > version. If it is found in testing, the package is removed from rolling. > If otherwise it is found in unstable, the package is picked from > unstable. > > This way, when something is broken in testing and cannot be unbroken > quickly, a maintainer who notices it could add (or make the people in > charge add) the necessary packages to the override file. If, for a > reason or another, an important bug fix or a security update doesn’t > propagate to testing quickly enough, you can now just add it and the > necessary dependencies to rolling, and people using it aren’t affected. > Whenever the affected packages finally migrate to testing, the > discrepancy between rolling and testing automatically disappears. > > The reason for the “at least” version rule is that new uploads to > unstable are supposed to fix the situation in testing anyway. I don’t > think we should keep in rolling packages that are no longer in unstable.
While I like the idea in general, I think that it should also be possible to upload packages directly to rolling (through rolling-proposed-updates). It will be useful in cases where neither the package in testing, not the package in unstable, can be used to fix a problem in rolling. - Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110504201222.ga31...@xanadu.blop.info
