I think we should start to much more aggressively move things to stable-cvs. Reason: many people use unstable only because stable is far to outdated for them. Thus we get a lot user complaints about breakake in unstable, even though this is normal to happen at times (it shouldn't but can happen). If OTOH the majority of users still uses stable and never gives feedback therefore.
Hence, I believe we should be a bit more pro-active when it comes to moving packages to stable. This also means we may have more often to revoke packages, but if done carefully, this shouldn't happen. So my guideline "when to move to stable", would be: 1) You yourself must have built & installed the package, and performed at least basic checks that it's operational (thus, please nobody in the future check in packages that were never tested except by eyeballing - this just almost never works out. I did this in the past myself, and several others here did, but we can learn from our mistakes, can't we? :-) 2) At least one other person must have succesfully built the package and installed it. Ideally they should also have performed a basic function test, if possible 3) You must check that *all* dependencies are verified in stable! This is of utmost importance. If there are dependencies missing, you can ask the maintainer of that package if he can move. 4) Again, *double check it*! Moving more aggressively does not mean: moving without thinking. Be careful, or you will make a lot of people unhappy. 5) As in the past, small bug fixes can under some conditions be put into stable directly. Like if you change descriptive fields (Maintainer, License, Description, etc).; if you fix a download URL; and also if you add a BuildDepends that is necessary because of a package that was just moved into stable and which not is splitoffized. Maybe there's more. Anyway no need to wait months for complaints/positive feedback. OK, so if we switch to this scheme, it's possible that it will turn out not to be a good idea at all, e.g. because we get tons more complaints. OTOH, only time can really tell how well this does, so I propose we just try it out for some time. Some packages I have built, installed, and in some cases tested (note that I didn't check the dependencies, you still have to do that): aalib-1.4rc4-5 libxslt-1.0.15-1 db3-3.3.11-6.info db4-4.0.14-6 f2c-20020123-2 freetype2-2.0.8-4 imagemagick-5.4.4-1 imlib-1.9.10-4 jikes-1.15-1 libxml-1.8.17-1 gd2-2.0.1-3 nano-1.0.9-1.info readline-4.2a-5.info r-base-1.4.1-3 (the one in stable is broken, BTW) r-recommended-1.4.0-2 xml-dom-pm-1.38-1.info xml-parser-pm-2.30-2.info xml-regexp-pm-0.03-2.info xml-simple-pm-1.05-2.info xml-writer-pm-0.4-2.info There are many more I can "testify" about I guess but I am to lazy to pick them all out now. I also would like to know if anybody here has built & run any of these so I can move: pan-0.11.3-1 gaim-0.56-3 sdl-1.2.4-1 Cheers, Max -- ----------------------------------------------- Max Horn Software Developer email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> phone: (+49) 6151-494890 _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
