On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 11:40:43AM +0200, J?r?me Marant wrote: > Jeff Breidenbach <jeff@jab.org> writes: > > I think Debian can very reasonably go either way; package 2.5.0b2 or > > wait for 2.5.0. I guesstimate Earl will release 2.5.0 before 2002. > > In any case, waiting for the stable release seems to me the more > reasonnable thing to do and moreover should be a guideline for > every debian developer (yeah I could give names of some people > who screwed things up when shipping beta versions).
I think that's a very black-and-white view. Some things are less safe in beta than others: libraries are the standard example. On the other hand, I doubt that anyone cares that trn4, say, is still in beta; in practice it's probably never going to get a stable release due to development being stagnant, but I'd take it over the stable trn (3.6) any day. It's clearly a judgement call for the maintainer. If a piece of beta software is in practice stable, in particular if it's a significant improvement even now over the previous stable release, and if there's going to be enough time to fix any unexpected problems that might occur before Debian's next stable release, then it's reasonable to package it. We should be fairly conservative about the possibility of breaking people's systems, certainly, but on the other hand if something is believed to be pretty safe then packaging it for unstable before it's officially released might mean we can help upstream catch a few more bugs earlier, which is good for the community. Davide Salvetti offered to adopt mhonarc last October. I e-mailed him about it in early August and never got a response, so I think I'll change its state back to orphaned and see if anybody else is interested in it. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
