On 2007-03-06, Joerg van den Hoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > as far as I can see, `ion3' is simply > flagged as "development" at the home page. so what is a poor guy wanting to > include `ion3' in a distro to do?
People should not include unstable/development software in "stable" distros. I'm not that annoyed with 20061223 being available now, but with the new "stable" Debian still providing it when people ask for "ion3", two years from now, as seems likely to be the case. So from two years from now, you still have to deal with lusers complaining about it. Debian/unstable does tend to normally have the latest release quite quickly, except now, that they've freezen it too, and you already get complaints from people using "the latest" -- in Debian. Gentoo, OTOH, only sporadically update their ebuilds, and they don't seem to have a proper maintainer either.. They seem to take the package directly from the home page, however, so I can just remove the old ones... And although occasionally you get some Gentoo user using some very old locked version (well, not recently anymore, actually), most often the user complaining of an old development snapshot, is a Debian or Ubuntu user. > or maybe forbid the use of `ion3' altogether? come on. tell you what: I'm > writing this while running ion3ds-20060524 which happens to lie around at the > macports > site because some nice guy added it to that package management system. > suits me fine. if I'm not content, sure I can download the official tarball > and > see whether I get it installed. fact is: I have work to do and the trade off > between having the latest&greatest and simply use what's there is easy for me > at > the moment. you want to force the guys to upgrade their system every few weeks > or remove `ion3' altogether? mmh. could serve as a strategy to ensure that > ion > users know each other personally in a few years. You use whatever version you want and works for you, but if you don't use the latest, stop complaining about any bugs and other glitches. Distros, however, should provide the latest or deal themselves with the lusers ignorant of the fact that they're not using the latest and should thus keep their mouths shut. At the very least they should warn with das big red blinkenletters that what they're using is old, to stay away from the upstream, and provide the support themselves. Nobody forces any user to upgrade something that works for them: the distro could easily ask if you want to upgrade to an incompatible version instead of doing it automagically. And I wish they did that, instead of breaking the system, like Debian often does. But if you don't use the latest, be aware that you get no support, and are on your own. I don't provide development snapshots with the intent of having to support them years from now, which seems to be Debian's idea of the matter. -- Tuomo
