Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I was trying to say "it depends on the package", but maybe I wasn't > clear enough about that. QA isn't a mechanical process that you can > apply in the same way across the board.
I understood correctly that "it depends on the package". I only want to point out that when you open doors like that, they are more risks that stories like those I described below happen. We are both responsible persons and we can take care of this. But how many of the 800 developers are aware of this? > > > > - I was very happy with using Konqueror 2.1, it was stable then Ivan > > Moore decided to ship beta versions of kde libs 2.2 and it suddenly > > crashed and no more kde app could stay in memory more than 30 seconds. > > - the current version of mp3blaster is a beta version and there are > > regressions in functionalities since some features are missing but > > were present in the previous version. > > Then obviously neither of those should have been packaged. > > > As I said before, there are many means of installing applications, > > people can download the tarball and break there systems it they > > want. When you distribute a beta version in debs, you have the > > risk to get bloated by BTS bugs about an application you know not > > to be fully debugged. > > That's not always what "beta" means. In the case of trn4, for instance, > the only reason it hasn't been declared stable is insufficient > documentation. There was even less documentation in trn 3.6, so trn4's > is an improvement. Furthermore, when upstream has slow development > cycles, packaging a known-to-be-pretty-solid "beta" release may well be > better for the users (i.e. result in fewer open bugs sooner) than > waiting for a "stable" release which is some way off. Packaging a shoddy > beta release will obviously lead to problems, in the same way as > packaging a shoddy stable release would. I agreed on this point. > > Please let's stop worrying about some blurry, exaggerated distinction > between "beta" and "stable" releases which isn't applied even vaguely > consistently anyway across different upstream developers, and instead > concern ourselves with the actual stability of the software. Jeff says At least, we talked about this problem. It was just "the latest straw that breaks the camel's back" since I consider myself as a victim of such bad behaviour from unresponsible developers over the last months. Of course, MhOnArc is not that critical. The subject should be publicly discussed, in my opinion. Cheers, -- Jérôme Marant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>