> Just to troll "out of the box" a bit:
>
> What are the reasons for freezing in the first place? Distribution
> versioning is not something I know much about! Help me out.
> 1) A known (re)starting point.
> 2) Bandwidth conservation - offload from mirrors to CD-ROM.
> 3) Life is simpler for the non sysadmins.
> What else?
>
> --
>
> Certainly things should "work". What if the freeze would
> only apply to contents of baseN_N.tgz (base_YYYY-MM-DD.tgz)
> or some very strictly limited subset? Maybe a new source
> tree, stable/unstable becomes base/stable/unstable
> where base is used to build the base*.tgz.
The idea of a distribution is that all of it should work in sync.
That is, it's no use having a nicely working base system if half of
the other software falls over due to broken dependencies or bad
compilation or serious bugs or whatever. The freeze period is a time
during which regular uploads into the distribution are stopped and we
try to ensure that as much of the distribution as possible is working
together, without being hampered by uploads (except for bug-fixes).
Note that this is far broader than just detecting and reporting bugs
in individual packages: we are looking also for bugs in the
distribution as a whole. Then, about a month later (here's hoping!),
we can announce to the Big Wide World that Debian Version x.y has been
released, you can download it from <URL>, etc. Without the stability
offered by a freeze, this would not be possible.
> Nor do I understand the ins and outs of why not perl5.005:
> if something is inevitable, general the quicker done the better.
> My business needs it and has been running it since it appeared
> in unstable for a few days some time ago. Does that mean
> base/stable/unstable/bleed? :-)
The main problem with Perl 5.005, AFAIK, is that it is not
binary-compatible with Perl 5.004. This means that any packages which
include compiled Perl extensions will fall over when Perl 5.005 is
installed. A secondary, but also very significant point, was the
desire to have versioned Perls, so that a Debian system may
simultaneously house Perl 5.004, 5.005, 5.006, 6.000, 6.001 etc. This
required a lot of thinking, and will almost certainly lead to
significant instability in unstable while the problems are ironed
out. All credit to our Perl team for such stirling work!
HTH,
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-*- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for my PGP public key. -*-
