On Thu, Aug 04, 2022 at 12:14:04PM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote:
> On 2022-08-04 10:35, William Edwards wrote:
>
> > However,
> > https://haproxy.debian.net/#distribution=Debian&release=buster&version=2.2
> > says:
> >
> > "The Debian HAProxy packaging team provides various versions of HAProxy
> > packages for use on different Debian or Ubuntu systems. The following
> > wizard helps you to find the package suitable for your system. [...] You
> > will get a stable release of HAProxy 2.2: you may not get the latest
> > version but important fixes from later versions are included. Moreover,
> > regressions are unlikely."
> >
> > The bugs page tries to get users to ALWAYS use the latest version. But
> > the haproxy.debian.org page says that it's okay not to use the latest
> > version.
>
> That's two different point of views, one from Debian, one from upstream.
> They are difficult to reconcile.
They will not for the simple reason that both have different goals and
difficulties:
- a project's goal is to reduce the number of bugs because bugs have
direct impact on users experience, cause insatisfaction, and waste
development time trying to analyse already fixed issues.
- a distro's goal is to limit the risk of *regressions*, because a
distro doesn't have the manpower nor skills to fix issues in every
project, and they're on the first line of bug reports. As such they
prefer to keep known bugs, than risking to break something for
existing users. Users continually experiencing issues will naturally
try another project / distro / version.
The only way for distros to limit the amount of bugs without risking
regressions currently is to ship proven stable versions. But in the
perpetually evolving world of the WWW, standards are dictated by users
(browsers, application componetns etc) and it's not always simple for
users to accept to stay on an older but much stable version.
The best solution to address the needs of users that are in between is what
you're doing, Vincent, with your packages on https://haproxy.debian.net/.
This is by far the best offer one can think of, and I confess that we're
extremely lucky as a project to benefit from this. I understand that not
all projects in a distro could have this, it's a significant extra work.
But it perfectly plugs the hole, and that's why I strongly encourage users
to switch to these packages. They remove some hassle from the distro since
upstream can handle bugs, and improve the users' experience by delivering
fixes for all known bugs.
If that would help, we could even add links to alternate repositories in
the output of "haproxy -v" so that users are more naturally invited to
switch if they feel like it better matches their needs.
Regards,
Willy
