On 2010-06-04, Eric Evans <eev...@rackspace.com> wrote: > So, the bigger problem here would seem to be one of long-term support. > In other words, trying to find common ground between release cycles. > > I am (have been) interested in uploading Cassandra to the Debian > archives, so let's use that as an example:
as a debian developer and a cassandra user, i don't think it makes much sense for cassandra to go into stable releases given its current rate of development. i also don't think cassandra is suited for volatile (or even volatile-sloppy) or backports. i think the best possible solution would be for cassandra to be maintained as a release quality package in debian unstable, with all external java dependencies packaged separately and available in debian unstable as well, but the cassandra package itself should be prevented from migrating to testing and kept out of stable. this would allow users to maintain debian stable installations, but pull in cassandra and its dependencies from unstable using package pinning. i think this would avoid the problem where, in order to create a stable backport, you also need to create backports for each of the java dependencies that are too old or don't exist in the stable distribution. (this assumes that there aren't radical changes to the java packaging policy that makes installing java packages from unstable on stable difficult.) if at some point in the future cassandra development slows down to the point where it would make sense to have a cassandra package in debian stable you could simply allow the package to migrate to testing. -- Robert Edmonds edmo...@debian.org
