Hi, I agree with Anand's POV.
I think I have stated a couple of times that I dislike the kind of abuse of 'experimental' that the gnome packages do, mostly because it's working around problems with the 'testing' idea (a package can percolate from unstable to testing when it actually shouldn't because of unexpressed dependencies -- i.e. an actual bug in the package that can't be catch by the testing scripts). Recently I realized that this is also working around the NEW queue problem: by staging packages _in_ the archive (e.g. in experimental) you basically put a package in the queue for ftp-master's attention and by prodding some ftp-master (say, on IRC -- and this is a discussion by itself) you can skip ahead on that queue. What I'm saying is that I don't see an actual technical reason not to use a staging area *outside* the archive (say, alioth) since -- at least the last time I read about this -- experimental isn't autobuilded. One could argue about mirrors, but my *feeling* is that the kind of people who are willing to use packages from experimental don't mind much about not having certain package mirrored. I'll be delighted if someone comes up with transfer statistics that prove me wrong. I actually like your argument for piecemeal upgrades. If the package interrelationships do not express a dependency, piecemeal upgrades should work. If they don't, that's an RC bug by our own standards. On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 12:31:15AM +1100, Anand Kumria wrote: > My criteria is (generally): has the maintainer released a version? If > I can't find a show-stopper, upload it. I don't believe a "blessed" > set of packages should prevent the uploading of individual > components. The problem with GNOME and these criteria is that a good deal of GNOME is shipped as independent libraries at the filesystem level but dependent at the functional level, so dropping a new (ABI compatible!) release on top of an older installation might break stuff. I have a vague recollection that fixing bugs in GTK+ has broken software that uses it. On top of all that, using Ubuntu as a staging area for Debian isn't one iota better. Debian users shouldn't have to go cherry picking to Ubuntu's archive. Solving Debian's problems *outside* Debian does not help Debian. It's rather easy to figure that one out, isn't it? Marcelo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
