On 30/08/11 at 10:34 +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > But both are wrong, too: it's always the job of both. It's not supposed > to be a struggle between maintainers and porters, but everyone in > Debian against bugs and shortcomings of our system.
Sure. But what happens when bugs and shortcomings are too hard to solve? For packages, we have several mechanisms to deal with packages that are not of releasable quality. We can remove them from testing, put them only in experimental, etc. Those mechanisms are very flexible, and allow for temporary decisions. Regarding architectures, we made releases with a semi-official status on two occasions at least (etch-m68k and kfreebsd in squeeze). Maybe we should officialize the fact that when we make stable releases, we have two sets of architectures: - the ones that are fully supported - the ones that are too experimental to be fully supported Being in the second set would be fine, and would not be a step towards being thrown out of Debian. Maintainers should still help porters get their packages ported, etc. But it would allow to relieve some of the pressure regarding testing migrations, for example. And it would be easy to move architectures from one set to another between releases, or even imagine that all architectures start each release cycle in the second set, and need to show that they can be promoted to the first set. And if we generalize this, it means that debian-ports.org could actually be part of Debian, because most of the architectures there could clearly be in the 'too experimental to be fully supported' set. I've always wondered what was the point of having some architectures part of stable releases as official architectures. Sure, they are very useful as experimental architectures, and very fun to work on, but it's unlikely that people will use them on production machines because the hardware is too old & slow, or some key piece of software is too unstable. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110831053424.ga29...@xanadu.blop.info