Moin Ralf! Ralf Nolden wrote: > well, as much as this would work out, someone has to do the work actually. > And > regarding the experimental distribution - that brings your work environment > to a highly unstable state, not to speak about the packagers having to build > the packages on this system.
The experimental distribution is designed for exactly this: Store packages that are not yet suitable for unstable. Packages don't need to be uber-unstable to be uploaded to experimental, though. It could also be used as a staging area to store the packages before everything is sorted out so they can be uploaded into unstable properly. Another advantage of using experimental is that everything would already be in the Debian archive: overrides, package names for the BTS, files in the pool etc. pp. This would mean that these packages could already use the Debian package infrastructure, even though they are not yet part of unstable. However, I doubt that experimental is autobuilt, so it'll require manual attention. This will make it easer to upload all relevant packages into unstable afterwards. > Now, let's please be reasonable about what can be done easily and what is > desireable. Have a quick look at the current state: Please take into account that quick and easy solutions are often not good and promising solutions. Going the proper path, however, sounds much better to me and will probably be less painful for the future. > The other thing is what version of Debian users want to run KDE on. I myself This is a completely different story, unfortunately. You'll have to separate two issues: unstable/sid and woody. Let's talk about woody first. The woody distribution was released in July and will stay stable until it will be removed from the Debian servers and moved to the Debian archive. Updates will address only security and very serious problems. KDE has no chance to get updated in woody except for security concerns (which will happen). However, no new version of KDE will be included in woody. This is nothing to worry about. This ensures that the stable distribution doesn't change too much during its lifetime. All installations and systems will more or less be the same. If you would like to provide newer KDE packages for woody, which would probably be a benefit from a users perspective, you'll need to bypass the Debian server. For this purpose, being able to add a line like "deb http://debian.kde.org woody main" to apt.sources, would probably the best and most logical solution (or switch the name to kde.debian.org/net). Addressing unstable should be the long-term goal for all KDE packages, since this will be the basis for the next stable distribution of Debian, which will be released in the future. Once all problems are sorted out, packages should be uploaded into the unstable distribution. Providing preliminary Debian packages on external resources will help developing packages for unstable. Using the experimental distribution of Debian will enable them to use the Debian infrastructure as well. > My idea would be better to create a debian.kde.org website to collect all > this > information and to host a permanent official build on ftp.kde.org. That can > be the releases as they are plus additional applications that are provided > for those builds. We can sort those in into ftp if we like to, and that is > the easiest way to provide people a one-liner for their sources.list to > update regularly. Having a native source for additional information, howtos, guidelines etc. is always a benefit. If such documentation is rather static and less of a moving target and also dedicated for end-users, it may be worth considering the use of www.debian.org. This will "automatically" add translations and is the native source for information addressing Debian. To conclude and since this mail is already quite long, from a core developer's perspective I would like to see: 1. debian.kde.org or kde.debian.org store more recent packages for woody for those who would like to run a more recent version than the one which is supplied with woody. This could run on a debian.org host (e.g. klecker) or on a kde.org host, and would be an "unofficial packges source". 2. In order to provide new packages for the unstable distribution I'd like to see the experimental distribution of Debian used, since this enables using the entire infrastructure of Debian except for the buildds. 3. Storing additional information on an easy to remember host like debian.kde.org or kde.debian.org is always good. However, it should probably be decided whether some information would also be suited for www.debian.org. Regards, Joey -- Every use of Linux is a proper use of Linux. -- Jon "Maddog" Hall Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
