-----Original Message----- From: Nate Bargmann [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2015 6:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Dng] Plan for Devuan to use Mozilla products as is
Unfortunately, this sort of inconsistency toward their definition of "stable" caused problems in other areas. During the time that Wheezy was stable a utility used by radio amateurs was rendered out of date as the organization that provided the utility changed cryptographic keys on the site the utility was used for so that a newer version was required. I entered a bug report that a backport of the newer version should be made available to all users of Wheezy. For various reasons it could not be done in such a way so that the older version would be replaced automatically. This was a failure of policy in my opinion as while it's fine to resist churn for the goal of stability, when a package is unusable due to external factors it should be upgraded. I would like for Devuan to consider this sort of corner case in the future and resist the urge to be so beholden to policy as to make the featured release unusable for a subset of its users. - Nate It's my belief that Debian QA is not what it once was, and will probably only continue to deteriorate. I remember (I think it was Etch) when the official sendmail package conf was broken. Since then, my expectations have fallen even lower. First, we have cornered packages. Then Debian dropping policy and going rapid release on browsers. In Wheezy on the installer, the clock never set local time instead of UTC even if you told it to. I've always had to manually patch it. The latest, now we have systemd mucking up the works. These are just small things, granted - but they show a consistent pattern over time, of either developer resources being stretched too thin or not enough care to perform proper QA. I really don't want to see Devuan handicapped because Debian screwed something up upstream. Not only does Devuan not have the manpower to maintain the huge number of Debian packages, but Debian's own policies toward management are inconsistent. With respect to everyone else's point of view on the subject, that is why I advocate the idea that Devuan should focus on a "core" subset similar to FreeBSD's approach. Everything else from Debian should be treated as a rolling release in an optional repository. By having a core subset and everything else being user hands on, Devuan can maximize the talent that it has. If Devuan did indeed decide to consider that approach someday, I would be very interested in helping to create a test case for modifying the maintenance process to see if it is a viable idea. t.j. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
