On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Robert Millan wrote: > On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 12:55:02PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > > > I could try to build a hacked perl and upload it for ftp.gnuab.org as > > "unreleased", if that's better than nothing, but then packages which > > build-depend on perl would have to be uploaded there as well. > > We have always uploaded packages to the official archive that depend on > packages from alpha.gnu.org (xfree86 for example has never been in debian > archive that I know of)
I consider X and perl very different in this respect. My upload policy is not to break ftp.debian.org for those who just have ftp.debian.org in their sources.list. For this people, packages which depend on the old xlibs at alpha.gnu.org may not be installed, so their existence does not make any "harm". Those packages simply can't be used. However, uploading packages which depend on perlapi-5.8.0 would replace the same packages which depend on perlapi-5.6.0, making them unuseable for those who only use ftp.debian.org. In other words, I think the transition to perl 5.8 in ftp.debian.org should be postponed until we have a working perl 5.8 in ftp.debian.org.
