On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 21:03, Fred K Ollinger wrote: > > The problem is that developers (I mean Debian Developers mostly) > > actually use unstable for their work. Having unstable packages to work > > with is ok for most packages, but when core things like XFree, gnome, > > kde ... are *really* unstable in unstable, people will get annoyed. > > Then they have to go look up what unstable really means. I think that they > should be running testing.
Also it should be noted that Debian/unstable is actually remarkably stable for the working tree of a large software development project. In terms of the size and complexity of the project, the number of developers, the lack of direct communication between developers (IE we're never in the same office), and the number of inter-dependencies it's a truely amazing effort that our development code is of such a high quality. When was the last time that a new version of fsck ate your file-system? When was the last time that glibc crashed and stuffed everything up totally? I recall it being moderately broken on one occasion and that was fixed pretty quickly. > > Yes, unstable is unstable, and developers expect brokenness here and > > there. But it's a question of magnitude. And: a big update requires a > > transistion plan to avoid stupid mistakes - and working out a transition > > plan that works is not easy and takes time, too. > > I thought that was the point of unstable. > > Really, I don't mind having alt apt lines. I like collecting them! I don't > mind pulling in a few unstable packages on a stable system. Actually I'd prefer to see all of this done in the unstable tree without any extra apt lines. I think that the only reason for needing new apt lines is if you have a development fork (for example the repositories of SE Linux packages that Brian and I run) or if you have legal issues (EG MP3 encoding). I think that unstable should have more unstable code!!! -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
