Re: On Sid and Experimental (GNOME3 transition)
On Sun, 2 Oct 2011 02:36:03 -0400 Manjul Apratim manjul.apra...@gmail.com wrote: cite a few, Sid still has rhythmbox-0.12 while I have been using rhythmbox-2.90 in both Ubuntu and Arch without problems for quite some time OK, what that comes down to is the migration to libgtk3 from libgtk2 and gnome3 from gnome2. That is in progress and it just takes longer to happen in Debian than in Ubuntu because of the extra architectures and various other differences. and needless to say it is present in Experimental, and Sid still does not have gnome-shell, which has also been present in Experimental for quite some time (I concede the need to build on all architectures and not just selfishly on mine, but isn't that the purpose of Testing?). Therefore, from purely a user's perspective, I wonder about the daunting task of maintaining Testing/Sid/Experimental separately - with due respect, if Sid was itself Experimental, and Testing the stabler version of that (but Stable) which would eventually mature into the next release, would that have been an inadequate scenario? Currently, if I wish to use software from Experimental, I would have to resort to apt-pinning, and I (personally of course) find that to be almost as dangerous as running Sid or using the actual software from Experimental itself; even as Monsieur Hertzog himself states in his blog, apt-pinning for the brave - I cannot help but view too many apt pins as an intentional recipe for disaster! There are plenty of people doing just that to find out how Gnome3 looks on their systems. It's a large transition and it takes time to complete. I am sure a lot of the discussion/explanation of this overlaps with the Continuously Usable Testing scenario and I apologize for the abject ignorance regarding past issues as well as the process of development, but I feel that Sid, as it stands, is pretty much a Continuously Usable Testing. So would it be unacceptable if Debian had, beyond Stable, just a Continuously Usable Testing and a Sid (which was itself Experimental)? Then, users wanting a mix of new software and stability will be able to use the CUT, while though Sid may break a little more than it does now (which has in my experience been never yet if one is careful), it would, aside from continuing to offer the latest and greatest from the FOSS world, be merely living up to its reputation :) I get the feeling you are proposing a major change on the basis of only a couple of packages which are deeply involved in a major ingoing transition which, when complete, will give you exactly what you wanted anyway because those versions will be available in testing and then in the Wheezy stable release. Those maintainers directly involved in the GNOME3 work will, I'm sure, comment on exactly how much longer the transition will take and what is currently blocking completion. -- Neil Williams = http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ pgpBt57Rlt4rH.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: On Sid and Experimental
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 02:36:03AM -0400, Manjul Apratim wrote: My reason for harassing the venerable Debian developers on here is probably not new and discussed time and again given the thoroughness with which Debian does everything: the time that I was not following Debian has witnessed the creation of the Experimental branch (pray correct me if I am wrong - in the sense that it did not exist before?). experimental has existed for longer than I've been involved with Debian, which is well before the time period you quoted. Perhaps you're simply observing it being used more for things you care about. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- 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/20111002091015.ga3...@riva.dynamic.greenend.org.uk
Re: On Sid and Experimental
On Sun, 2 Oct 2011, Manjul Apratim wrote: Therefore, from purely a user's perspective, I wonder about the daunting task of maintaining Testing/Sid/Experimental separately - with due respect, if Sid was itself Experimental, and Testing the stabler version of that (but Stable) which would eventually mature into the next release, would that have been an inadequate scenario? The problem, as I see it, is that you are looking on the four distributions as they would be delivered to you while debian as a project sees them as parts of the release system. Unstable, Testing and Stable form a chain that makes up the very foundation of the next Stable release. When you forget that part and the logic behind them I can totally understand why one would like to see Unstable as more true to the name than it is today. On the other hand; quality and usability is as important as new upgraded versions of the software. Not everyone was overly pleased with the introduction of KDE 4 series when that happened. Ask Canonical about the upgrade to Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 - I am sure not everyone was pleased with that either. Currently, if I wish to use software from Experimental, I would have to resort to apt-pinning, and I (personally of course) find that to be almost as dangerous as running Sid or using the actual software from Experimental itself; even as Monsieur Hertzog himself states in his blog, apt-pinning for the brave - I cannot help but view too many apt pins as an intentional recipe for disaster! Apt-pinning or installing things the old fashioned way by building from source are more or less equallly bad in that sense, but we enable you to do so. That's the nice thing about the universal operating system. -- /brother http://martin.bagge.nu Bruce Schneier decrypted the Bible. The plaintext read, Bruce Schneier. -- 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/alpine.deb.2.00.1110021155460.3...@salyut.bsnet.se
Re: On Sid and Experimental
Hiya, Manjul Apratim wrote: I cannot help but view too many apt pins as an intentional recipe for disaster! If you really want to experience life on the edge, you can try this: echo 'APT::Default-Release experimental;' \ /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/preferexperimental.conf Used in combination with apt-listbugs, the result generally pretty pleasant and stable. To piggy-back on what Martin said: the current suites all have release management roles. See the suite update policy at http://release.debian.org/ for an overview. stable: the released OS distribution, which has received a lot of QA work. Does not change except at point releases (every few months) and major release (every couple of years or so). stable-proposed-updates: where the next minor update of stable cooks. People prepare packages for here directly, and although the individual fixes that get used are tested in unstable first, the reliability of the final packages is mostly due to code review. testing: where the next major update of stable cooks. No package should be missing dependencies, except occasionally when needed to get through a transition. Packages come from unstable (with a few exceptions) and get tested there first. The purpose of the testing suite is to make sure packages work well together and can function as a coherent distribution. unstable: where packages for testing get built and initially tested. No package enters here unless the package maintainer is confident that it or some later version will be suitable for the next stable release. Build-time dependencies of packages in unstable are taken from unstable, so maintainers exercise care before updating ABI-incompatible new versions of libraries here --- and (at least in simple cases) when library ABI changes happen, related packages get rebuilt and accumulate here before they can move all at once to testing. Nevertheless, unstable can be a site of rapid change. It is normal for packages in unstable to be missing dependencies that have not been built or uploaded yet. experimental: where packages are uploaded when either (a) they should not be uploaded to unstable to avoid disrupting an ongoing interface transition or (b) they are not ready for upload to unstable for some other reason (maybe they need more testing before reaching a large audience). Much of GNOME 3 falls in category (a) --- these packages are moving from experimental to unstable in small, coherent batches so they can migrate to testing more efficiently. If I understand its goals correctly, CUT would also play a release management role. In addition to making it easier for people to test that packages in testing work well together, it could provide the raw material for making pre-releases of the next version of the installation media. Hope that clarifies a little. Jonathan -- 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/20111002103726.GA14294@elie
Re: On Sid and Experimental
Le dimanche 02 octobre 2011 à 02:36 -0400, Manjul Apratim a écrit : And now a lot of software in Sid is no more the latest that the FOSS world has to offer - to cite a few, Sid still has rhythmbox-0.12 while I have been using rhythmbox-2.90 in both Ubuntu and Arch without problems for quite some time and needless to say it is present in Experimental, and Sid still does not have gnome-shell, which has also been present in Experimental for quite some time (I concede the need to build on all architectures and not just selfishly on mine, but isn't that the purpose of Testing?). So basically your mail boils down to “why isn’t GNOME 3 in sid yet?”. It has absolutely nothing to do with the number of architectures we support. You can see experimental is built for all of them, and that includes GNOME 3 packages. What you see is an unfortunate consequence of the way we manage releases. New sets of packages that have to be introduced together (these are called “transitions”) can only enter unstable when they are ready to not break anything and migrate to testing. This is what ensures the quality and stability of our releases. Most of the time, this is not a problem. However, right after a freeze, there is a backlog of packages that have not been uploaded, and the most complex ones (here, the GNOME 2 → GNOME 3 transition, which involves more than a hundred packages) get delayed, despite being ready in experimental. An obvious solution to that problem is to stop freezing testing at freeze times, or at least to freeze it for a smaller amount of time. The release team argues that people will stop working on stabilizing the upcoming release if we do that, and you can’t blame them for being afraid of such a situation. Another thing that should help prepare transitions better is the availability of a PPA-like solution. But I’m not sure it addresses this specific bottleneck. Cheers, -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' `- signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: On Sid and Experimental
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 7:16 AM, Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org wrote: Le dimanche 02 octobre 2011 à 02:36 -0400, Manjul Apratim a écrit : And now a lot of software in Sid is no more the latest that the FOSS world has to offer - to cite a few, Sid still has rhythmbox-0.12 while I have been using rhythmbox-2.90 in both Ubuntu and Arch without problems for quite some time and needless to say it is present in Experimental, and Sid still does not have gnome-shell, which has also been present in Experimental for quite some time (I concede the need to build on all architectures and not just selfishly on mine, but isn't that the purpose of Testing?). So basically your mail boils down to “why isn’t GNOME 3 in sid yet?”. It has absolutely nothing to do with the number of architectures we support. You can see experimental is built for all of them, and that includes GNOME 3 packages. What you see is an unfortunate consequence of the way we manage releases. New sets of packages that have to be introduced together (these are called “transitions”) can only enter unstable when they are ready to not break anything and migrate to testing. This is what ensures the quality and stability of our releases. Most of the time, this is not a problem. However, right after a freeze, there is a backlog of packages that have not been uploaded, and the most complex ones (here, the GNOME 2 → GNOME 3 transition, which involves more than a hundred packages) get delayed, despite being ready in experimental. An obvious solution to that problem is to stop freezing testing at freeze times, or at least to freeze it for a smaller amount of time. The release team argues that people will stop working on stabilizing the upcoming release if we do that, and you can’t blame them for being afraid of such a situation. Another thing that should help prepare transitions better is the availability of a PPA-like solution. But I’m not sure it addresses this specific bottleneck. Cheers, -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' `- Thank you everybody for the clarifications! I clearly understand now that the software transition from Experimental - Sid has more to do with the way the release system works than all the architectures the packages are compiled for! As I said before, being completely agnostic about the level of work that goes into the development process and having but a vague idea, I was merely musing from my own perspective. It is indeed strange on my part that I had never before noticed the existence of Experimental, and I stand corrected! (I guess I was too happy running Etch, and subsequently Lenny). Certainly, the many layers of extensive testing that software in Debian goes through is the reason Stable turns out to be the rock-solid distribution it is. I don't really mind that gnome3 is not (at least completely) in Sid yet - for I know that when it shall be, it shall be of a quality I have come to expect from Debian. At some point of time (after I am done wrapping up my thesis), I would like to get myself involved in the Debian development process. To do so it only fits/is necessary that my views and ideas are concurrent with Debian's philosophical views as well! -- Manjul Apratim
