Hi! On Sun Aug 24, 2003 at 09:10:18AM -0400, David Crane wrote: > Or are we in a period of an unusual amount of activity in "testing?"
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ says: "This release started as a copy of woody, and is currently in a state called ``testing''. That means that things SHOULD not break as bad as in unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed, and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them." http://www.debian.org/devel/testing says: How could installing a package into "testing" possibly break other packages? The structure of the distribution archives is such that they can only contain one version of a package; a package is defined by its name. So, when the source package acmefoo is installed into "testing", along with its binary packages acme-foo-bin, acme-bar-bin, libacme-foo1 and libacme-foo-dev, the old version is removed. However, the old version may have provided a binary package with an old soname of a library, such as libacme-foo0. Removing the old acmefoo will remove libacme-foo0, which will break any packages which depend on it. Evidently, this mainly affects packages which provide changing sets of binary packages in different versions (in turn, mainly libraries). However, it will also affect packages upon which versioned dependencies have been declared of the ==, <= or << varieties. When the set of binary packages provided by a source package change in this way, all the packages that depended on the old binaries will have to be updated to depend on the new binaries instead. Because installing such a source package into "testing" breaks all the packages that depended on it in "testing", some care now has to be taken: all the depending packages must be updated and ready to be installed themselves so that they won't be broken, and, once everything is ready, manual intervention by the release manager or an assistant is normally required. If you are having problems with complicated groups of packages like this, contact debian-devel or debian-release for help. So long Thomas -- .''`. Obviously we do not want to leave zombies around. - W. R. Stevens : :' : Thomas Krennwallner <djmaecki at ull dot at> `. `'` 1024D/67A1DA7B 9484 D99D 2E1E 4E02 5446 DAD9 FF58 4E59 67A1 DA7B `- http://bigfish.ull.at/~djmaecki/
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