On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 16:38:14 -0500
Jason Clinton wrote:
In the past two days, etch (testing) has been updated with a kde meta
package which apparently depends on packages from unstable which, in
turn, has caused aptitude to suggest removing KDE when performing a
system-wide upgrade. I have been able to hold it back by following the
dependacy tree backwards and marking the troubled packages
(kfilereplace, kimagemapeditor, klinkstatus, komander, kxsldbg) to
hold. It appears that parts of kde-3.4.2 have slipped through the
ftpmasters prematurely. Can anyone else confirm this? Why did this
happen? Was this a mistake?
Hm, well, I understand that you're having a problem, but I don't really
see it as a problem with testing, or that testing is broken; but rather,
it seems more like a problem with the idea that stuff like this won't
happen with testing. In fact, this kind of thing tends to happen quite
frequently in testing, when testing is far from a planned release as
stable. It's in the nature of what testing is. Wait for a while and
it'll sort itself out. If you don't wanna wait a while, stable or
unstable are for you. Testing is not offered up as a robust distribution,
and never has been; it's an automated collection of packages drawn from
unstable that are considered releasable due to certain criteria.
Sometimes stuff gets by the scripts. Last year, there were extended
periods where GNOME and KDE were uninstallable out of testing (in KDE's
case, I'm pretty sure it lasted months). Only after a pre-release
freeze goes in should testing be considered robust enough to complain
about stuff like this happening.
-c
I have to say that during the time between Woody and Sarge (a long
time) people were encouraged to use testing as a nearly stable
platform. Without it, Debian may have been abandoned by a significant
part of its user base. Isn't testing like a beta-test distribution? If
this is its intended pupose, wouldn't it be a good idea to try to
assure that large scale problems are kept to a minimum? Otherwise, you
will be minimizing the size of your test group. 
