On 04/16/2015 08:30 PM, Oliver Eichler wrote: > Debian and it's release cycles :) Wouldn't it be better to decouple > distribution releases from applications like > QMapShack? Just having a build farm that creates binary for a certain history > of Debian releases?
I strongly advise against hosting your own 3rd party APT repository for your software. 3rd party repositories are the number one source for broken upgrades, because proper packaging is non-trivial. Having multiple package lineages in a single distribution release adds a lot of undesirable complexity increasing the maintenance burden significantly. In my opinion package maintenance is best left to the distribution developers to allow upstream developers to focus on developing the upstream sources. It takes a lot of time to gain the experience for proper package maintenance, there are a lot of new tools to learn, documentation to read and policies to know. Proper backports are the best way to get recent upstream versions available in Debian stable. For leaf packages like qlandkartegt & qmapshack this is very viable, for libraries like GDAL, GEOS, netCDF & HDF5 this is not so easy. Library ABI changes require rebuilds of all packages depending on the library for instance, for popular libraries this adds significant overhead. All those packages need to be build and tested, the latter especially consumes a lot of time. > I have to admit that it's much better today than it had been a few years ago. > Ubuntu drove me nuts as > Debian was shipping with really historical versions of QLandkarte GT and I > had to deal with bug report solved > more than a year. That madness stopped at a certain point. Not sure if that > stopped because there was a > change in Debian/Ubuntu or it became a fact that I was reacting quite badly > on such reports. ;) I'm not aware of the Ubuntu situation, the old LTS releases still contain ancient qlandkartegt versions: 0.17.1-1 in lucid (2010-02-15) and 1.2.3-1build1 in precise (2011-12-13); trusty, utopic & vivid all have a 1.7.x version. The qlandkartegt package was initially maintained in Debian by Michael Hanke (2009-2011), his last version was 1.2.3-1 the version still in precise. In 2012 Jaromír Mikeš became a co-maintainer of the qlandkartegt package which resulted in the packaging of version 1.4.0 for which they had to deal with some Debian Free Software Guidelines problems. Jaromír has since actively maintained the package. Since 2014 I've started to co-maintain the package alongside Jaromír. I was especially motivated by the non-working OSM tiles in the wheezy version. We still carry a couple of patches in the Debian package to revert the removal of the OSM TMS support in the upstream sources. I still miss an easy way to add web maps (WMS/WMTS/TMS) to QMapShack before I can switch away from QLandkarteGT. > With QMapShack I can't complain so far. On the one hand side it's still not > that known. I have ~100 > downloads a day for QLGT, and that is without the distributions. It's 100-200 > downloads a week for > QMapShack. But anyway, I do not get bug reports due to out dated versions. > And that is really nice. > Probably due to your excellent work, Bas. I really appreciate that. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, Jaromír Mikeš deserves most of the credit for the well maintained qlandkartegt & qmapshack packages in recent years. QLandKarteGT & QMapShack were initially not maintained within the Debian GIS team. Jaromír got in contact with the Debian GIS team in search for a Debian Developer to sponsor the upload of his new qmapshack package and DM-upload privileges. I asked Jaromír to join the team and move the packages so they could benefit from more team maintenance and be eligible for the Sponsoring of Blends initiative by Debian Developer Andreas Tille. Since the qlandkartegt & qmapshack packages were moved to the Debian GIS team I've started to co-maintain them with Jaromír as part of my effort to keep all packaged maintained by the Debian GIS team uptodate with their upstream releases. I co-maintain a lot of packages within the Debian GIS team, many I don't actually use myself. Since no-one else has enough time to maintain those packages, I do my best to keep them updated to benefit the wider userbase of GIS packages on Debian and its derivative distributions (Ubuntu, OSGeo-Live, Mint, etc). QLandkarteGT and to a lesser extent QMapShack as described above are among the packages that I actually do use myself. > But still I do not understand why an outdated version is shipped. Wouldn't it > be better to ship the core > system and provide a source to get recent versions of applications with a > much faster production cycle? Debian prides itself on the stability of its stable distribution. This is achieved with extensive QA during development and periodic freezing of package versions in the testing distribution to resolve the remaining serious issues before a new stable release is made. We're currently in the freeze in preparation of the next stable release (jessie) on April 25th, the freeze started on November 5th last year. QMapShack 0.6.0 was the latest version in testing at that time. Version 0.7.0 did not migrate from unstable to testing in time for the freeze due to failed/missing builds on some of the ports Debian supports IIRC. It takes between 5 and 10 days for package to migrate from the unstable distribution to testing, if no release critical bugs are filed during that time in unstable to package will migrate automatically if all its dependencies can do so too. Build failures are a typical example of release critical bugs as are Debian Policy & DFSG violations. To actively track upstream releases, the rolling distributions like Gentoo and Arch tend to be better suited but their developer base is not as large as that of Debian especially when you include its derivates like Ubuntu. Ubuntu has the old version problem to a much lesser extent because they more frequently release snapshots based on Debian unstable, but their LTS release also don't see new upstream version during their lifetime like Debian stable releases. > I do not want to say that SuSE is doing everything well (still no binary for > QMapShack! I send you Lrrr - ruler > of the planet omicron persei eight!). They do not ship software like mine on > their DVD image. However you > can go to their webpage and install it quite easily via one click install. > (But outdated version for QLGT! Die > earthlings!) I think that makes much more sense, from the user's point of > view. For OpenSuSE you should get in contact with Angelos Tzotsos <[email protected]>, he maintains may GIS related packages for OpenSuSE beside his involvement in the OSGeo-Live project (based on UbuntuGIS packages which in turn are maintained by the Debian GIS team in Debian). OpenBuildService is a wonderful SuSE project to allow anyone to provide their own packages, in a similar spirit to Launchpad and its PPA for Ubuntu. Debian still has no official service for 3rd party repositories. Kind Regards, Bas -- GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1 Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146 50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BPM Camp - Free Virtual Workshop May 6th at 10am PDT/1PM EDT Develop your own process in accordance with the BPMN 2 standard Learn Process modeling best practices with Bonita BPM through live exercises http://www.bonitasoft.com/be-part-of-it/events/bpm-camp-virtual- event?utm_ source=Sourceforge_BPM_Camp_5_6_15&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VA_SF _______________________________________________ Qlandkartegt-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qlandkartegt-users
