On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 02:05:38AM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote: > Feel free to reply to this thread regarding any ideas on cleanups, or > anything else related to packaging.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about Debian and KDE3 and I think
most of it stems from not having a standard consistent location were people
can find the Debian KDE3 debs from. While we don't want to pollute
Debian/unstable with non gcc-3.2 KDE3 packages, we also aren't building
and managing the Debian KDE3 packages in a coherent fashion.
Enter the Debian/experimental distribution, which is a perfect place for
the various Debian KDE3 package maintainers to coordinate their packages:
The packages with this distribution value are deemed by their
maintainers to be high risk. Oftentimes they represent early
beta or developmental packages from various sources that the
maintainers want people to try, but are not ready to be a part
of the other parts of the Debian distribution tree. Download at
your own risk.
For example over the last few months if you were on the ball you knew
you could chase up and around the following locations to get a hold
of a 'full' KDE3 suite of Debian packages:
people.debian.org # Various additional KDE maintainers such as myself
kde3.geniussystems.net # Seems to come and go, but it currently has
some 3.0.8 deb's up!
shakti.ath.cx # Karolina's great but different work with 3.0.8
download.uk.kde.org # Linked to official KDE release, current best
source for 3.0.4, had some 3.0.8 for a while but
then they went again :-(
plus there are mirrors of all of the above sites in various states of
completion and many mirrors are lagging synchronisation by a couple of releases.
So if I'm a user and want to have these various packages I need an extra
couple if not 4 or 5 different apt/sources lines included. If I'm one of
the many other KDE3 package maintainers (which I am) I have a real problem
deciding which fork of the above I should build my packages for which I then
upload to people.debian.org.
My proposal is that Debian KDE3 maintainers use the Debian/experimental
distribution for the coordination of Debian KDE3.
This has the advantages that these packages then become a part of the
Debian distribution/ mirrors but are flagged as being 'work in progress',
other Debian KDE3 developers know what the current core is and can
work to uploading complementary packages to a known state and location.
All Debian developers are able to upload their packages to the experimental
distribution by indicating this in the package debian/changelog.
Once the gcc-3.2 transition is developed then this can be the appropriate
time to move KDE3 from experimental to unstable.
Mark
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