So. On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 01:40:39PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > Hello! > > I just noticed how maintainers are NMU'ing packages in large quantities to > get them somehow in a usable state for the release. The packages get small > patches so that they are more or less working and can get into testing, > despite the packages being untouched for a long time in some cases meaning > there is no guarantee for quality.
I was one of these maintainers. gridengine has been in Debian since 2008, and the version in Buster works well. I don't have time to maintain it, but I do use it often, and some of the work I do for the debconf and FOSDEM video teams relies on it being available. It was pointed out to me shortly before the freeze that it was not in bullseye because of a "FTBFS with gcc-10" bug for which a (rather trivial) patch was already available. Unfortunately it turned out that that patch wasn't sufficient, so I had to repeat the pattern one more time to make it work. The patch is *still* very trivial though. There is now a gridengine package in Bullseye again, and it works as well as it did in Buster. I don't agree with the statement that doing things like this is a bad idea. Sometimes doing the minimal necessary to make a package work again so that our future needs will still be served by it is a good idea. I think that this is one of those times, and I guess that it's the same for most of the packages uploaded like that. -- To the thief who stole my anti-depressants: I hope you're happy -- seen somewhere on the Internet on a photo of a billboard
