Delays in package processing

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Fri Dec 21 11:51:03 UTC 2007


Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora <at> leemhuis.info> writes:
> Especially building and shipping a new upstream release in all supported
> branches at nearly the same time seems totally wrong to me, but is what
> a lot of people do. Thx do the bodhi and the testing repos at least the
> releases for the stable branch now get a bit delayed.

Sure, pushing straight to stable is not so great an idea in most cases, but I 
think pushing to testing at the same time we're pushing to Rawhide (or almost) 
is usually not bad timing (assuming the update is appropriate for the release 
in the first place). Testing is there to test things. Some big changes happen 
in Rawhide first and are then backported to stable releases if they're 
important enough, but for minor version updates to upstream bugfix releases, I 
don't see why they shouldn't hit testing at the same time as Rawhide.

That's what I dislike about the way Debian handles unstable->testing 
transitions: the age of an update, by itself, is a very bad metric for its 
reliability. Big changes need more testing than trivial bugfixes. Holding 
packages for an arbitrary amount of time for no other reason than that said 
time has not elapsed yet only delays updates for no good reason. So please 
let's not get there. I think the current system where the maintainer decides 
when to push what where is really the best solution.

        Kevin Kofler




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