On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:48:22AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > [I'm personally slightly concerned about relaxing britney allowing > testing to get into unreleasable states; a flag to re-enable the old > behavoir late in release would probably be good.]
Adeodato's proposal makes a lot of sense, but still I agree with the above. "Always in a releasable state" was a good design decision for testing, and this change will muddy the idea a bit further. At the very least, there should be an auto-generated web page listing packages in testing that are currently unreleasable! For a cleaner separation, testing could be split it two: The normal, releasable testing works according to the strict rules as before. A second, add-on repository (let's call it "mouldy";-) can realize Adeodato's idea: It is only intended to be added to sources.list _in addition to testing_, and contains out-of-date library packages and the programs which depend on them. Rather than removing packages from testing to make way for a new transition, britney would move them over to "mouldy". This way, they would still be available. At the same time, the fact that they moved there is a clear sign to the respective maintainers that they need to do something to get their packages into a releasable state. Once the problem is resolved, those packages which only indirectly depended on the library transition can be moved back from "mouldy" to testing without recompilation. I can't say I'm too much of an expert with these issues, so there may be problems with this scheme. For example, it is possible that "mouldy" would end up containing everything and testing would be empty, which would buy you nothing. :) Cheers, Richard -- __ _ |_) /| Richard Atterer | GnuPG key: 888354F7 | \/¯| http://atterer.net | 08A9 7B7D 3D13 3EF2 3D25 D157 79E6 F6DC 8883 54F7 ¯ '` ¯ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org