On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 06:59:12PM -0500, Daniel Reed wrote: >On the other hand, speaking as a developer, when I do make a release, there >is usually a decent reason. If nothing else, I believe the maintainers of >[apparently] out-of-date packages should at least be prepared to explain why >the package version is lower than the vendor version. I agree this should >not have to be done repeatedly, though; I marked 2.5.27 as "ignore-before", >so flex will not show up again until/unless a version newer than 2.5.27 is >listed in the "Stable" tree at freshmeat.
I don't agree that package maintainers should have to defend the decision not to release a newer version of a program. It has never, AFAIK, been a requirement that new packages must be released. It is just a "would be nice". However, we obviously don't want popular packages to fall far behind either. Hopefully, popular packages will have enough user pressure to cause updates. FWIW, I don't think that byacc is a popular package, so I don't intend on rigorously keeping it up to date. >I am also going to look into ways to always pull from the stable tree at >freshmeat, instead of just whatever tree the vendor listed first (which is >sometimes the development tree, as is the case with gnugo). > >I am not sure what to do with things like Apache, though. Apache has two >"stable" trees, 1.3 and 2.0. Both trees still at least have periodic >maintenance releases, so neither one is necessarily worse than the other, >but eventually the lower of the two *will* stop being updated. It's just >that that day has not yet arrived. Freshmeat lists 2.0 as "Stable" and 1.3 >as "1.3", with a separate third "Development" tree. That's an "up to the maintainer" decision. cgf
