-=| Zeno Gantner, Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:25:44PM +1100 |=- > > On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ahmad Zawawi <ahmad.zaw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I also noticed that Padre 0.76 is still not uploaded to Debian > > experimental (http://packages.debian.org/experimental/padre). Any > > problems regarding the new version? How much time does it take for an > > experimental package to become stable?
Oh, my! :) Not soon, in couple of years, but read on. > It may not be in experimental, but it is in unstable ;-) > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/padre > > If I understand it correctly, the stability hierarchy in Debian is > > experimental > unstable > testing > stable > > Normal development takes place in unstable. Packages that do not have > release-critical bugs for a while get promoted to testing. > Packages move from unstable/testing to stable only in a major release, > which is a rather rare event. > > Experimental is only used for packages where the maintainers know > beforehand that they may break things. > > I hope I got that more or less right; Damyan, correct me where I am > wrong. Excellent short summary. A bit more can be read on http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives When I started working on padre package update to 0.74, I knew the plugin API has changed since 0.63, so I needed a staging area to prepare padre *and* plugin updates. Even if Debian has only a handful of plugins packaged, due to time/load constraints this took me quite some time. I didn't want to break padre for unstable users so I used experimental. Meanwhile 0.76 was out, there were no surprises since 0.74 so used that release to update all packages (padre + plugins) in unstable. Now for stable. There is a process of testing to become stable, which takes several months. First testing is "lildly frozen", which means that the automatic transition when a package and its dependencies are bug-free for a certain period is halted. Migration is made only after a justified request of the package maintainer. After some time testing is "deeply frozen", which changes the allowed justification from "fixes an important bug" to "fixes a serious, grave or crirical bug and doesn't change anything else". (bug severities are explained on http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities) Finally, at some point the release managers declare the testing gold and release it as the new stable. The flow of packages from unstable to testing is untapped again, an the next development cycle starts. The current testing is in "deep freeze" and was frozen in August. It has padre 0.63 and this is what will be in the upcoming stable. 0.76, or more likely, some future padre version will be present in the stable release after the upcoming one, when released somewhere around two years from now (there are no strict schedules). Given the rapid pace of Padre develpment and the long freeze period of Debian releases, it is inevitable that at the time of the release, the mainstream Padre will be leaps ahead. BTW, when I started to do the initial package of Padre, I asked on this if such a divergence would pose a problem and got a negative answer, so I guess things are just normal. Happy hacking, dam
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