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On Aug 1, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Dave Vasilevsky wrote:
Martin,
I'm sorry if we came off as brash and inconsiderate. I definitely
was not advising that we shouldn't package gfortran 4.1-CVS out of
ideology, or blindly following rules. Hopefully my explanations
here can allay your concerns.
First, I agree with you that every package should have
representation in Fink. If there was no gfortran in Fink, I would
want one. But we already have gfortran as part of gcc4 4.0.1. The
question so far as I understand it is what version should be in
Fink, the released 4.0.1 or the pre-release CVS snapshots from 4.1.
Sometimes we do release CVS snapshots, and I don't think there
should be a policy "snapshots are never, ever ok". There are plenty
of cases where pre-release software should clearly be in Fink:
* Other packages, which we want in Fink, depend on unreleased
features.
* There's a critical bug in the last release version, and it's
impossible to backport a fix.
* There are important new features/bugfixes in unreleased versions,
and there's no prospect of a new release any time soon.
* Only the snapshots actually work, older versions are broken.
But when it comes to including pre-release software, we face the
strong possibility that things aren't ready for release (hence the
name). This is why we don't have daily CVS checkpoints of GTK+ for
example. We already have a working, reasonably stable package. And
we can be pretty sure there will be a new release in a few weeks or
months, so the new features will get to users. It's not worth it to
break GTK+ every time some committer to their CVS repository screws
up.
Basically, we don't want to turn our users into unwitting beta-
testers when they update-all.
The arguments for including gfortran 4.1-CVS all seem to have
better solutions than putting 4.1-CVS in Fink unstable, here are
the ones I've seen:
- To practice gfortran packaging, so Fink can get 4.1 quickly after
it is released. This is what experimental is for!
- So GCC can allow users to test gfortran 4.1 snapshots. This can
be done without making every Fink user beta-test, by telling users
who actually want test 'download this .info file, put it in your
local finkinfo dir and type fink update gfortran'.
Even easier than that, have gfortran and a gfortran-cvs packages.
This way most users can install the released version, but as new
snapshots are made, those users wishing to can easily stay up to date.
- -chris zubrzycki
- - --
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