Fully agree, basically, only small comments below ..
On 13 Jun 2008, at 02:43, David R. Morrison wrote:
> 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.
I've noticed your commits in the last few days going into that
direction,
and was wondering what you were up to ...
Admiring your courage!
Thanks !
>
> 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
That's how I understand it too; still remains to find some arrangement
for a "bindist team" completely independent of whwtever is the "fink
team",
but that we all have full confidence in _ Just in order to free you
from those
things, and have you back as before ... :)
>
> 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.
I think you refer to a proposal of Martin Costabel _ to which I FULLY
agree _
but _ to be clear _ it meant putting the current pangocairo branch
straight
into both unstabe and stable..
(which is essentialy what you suggesrt below, or I misunderstand ?)
> What's fantastic about the work that the pango-cairo-branch-team
i.e., RR and dmacks ...
> 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.
Here I would beg to disagree, specifically with the term "lots" ..
Just a couple of days ago, I sent to the above-mentioned "pango-cairo-
branch-team"
a summary showing that in my installation, with probably more than
half of
fink pkgs installed (~650K files and directories), there was serious
trouble
only with half a dozen pkgs ... (i.e,. 1 or 2 permil ?)
This is orders of magnitude above what I've ever seen in past
transitions
from one 10.x to 10.{x+1} _ where the attrition rate would have been
several
percentage points !
In addition, ALL of the pkgs involved were broken completely
independently
of pangocairo specifics _ and possibly some of them will still be
redeemed..
It is clear that in such an installation I tend to have more "basic"
pkgs
involved than "leaf packages", and that somewhat less effort has been
expended on the latter, but the same thing thing is true in current
(or any)
stable : leaf pkgs may be slightly less trustworthy ..
> 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.
I don't understand well what you mean with the term "active"; if I
ommit it,
this is what what Martin was proposing _ and convingly arguing it was
the only way to go.
So,I would be tempted to interpret both propsals as the same :
1) dump all of of the pangocairo branch into both stable and unstable
2) in the next week or so, apply somewhat more stringent criteria to
remove pkgs from stable rather than from unstable...
Is it something like this you have in mind ??
Cheers,
JF
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