Greetings, fink developers. There have been a number of threads over the past few months about the fate of the stable branch. I want to start a new one, in which I will make a different proposal than the ones made in the past.
From my point of view, the stable branch might well be named the "bindist-candidate branch". This is where we can collect versions of packages which we hope will be eligible for the next bindist, and work on them as a group until they all build, have no missing dependencies, validate, and so on. Now it is true that there hasn't been a bindist in two years, and there has never been one for 10.5. However, I've heard the opinion expressed that if we simply abandon the current stable branch at the time pango-cairo is merged back to HEAD (i.e., dump all of unstable into stable), this will bring us closer to the next bindist. In my opinion, it will bring us farther away. What's fantastic about the work that the pango-cairo-branch-team has been doing is that the packages in that branch have been very thoroughly vetted -- everything validates, the dependencies are all there, and so on. We definitely need a coherent set of packages with these characteristics if we want to release a bindist some day. However, there are lots of parts of the unstable tree which have *not* been worked on by the pango-cairo-branch-team. Many of those packages are truly unstable, and were we to dump them to a "bindist-candidate" tree (i.e., the stable tree), we would set the clock back on a bindist until such time as all of the bugs could be ironed out of *those* packages. So here's my proposal. When the pango-cairo-branch is merged back, we put all of the *active* files from that branch immediately into the stable tree. Now this is going to cause problems for stable-only users, since not all of the dependencies are there. However, on the one hand folks on this list assure me that nobody uses stable-only anymore, and on the other hand a few weeks work can restore all of the needed dependencies. So I believe this is a sound strategy. Your feedback is welcome. -- Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel
