Dear Hubert, Thank you for expressing your concerns.
When I stepped in to maintain 'abiword' its development release 2.9.1 was already packaged and I fully support this decision. 'Stable' 2.8.6 had great many bugs with very little hope for fix because stable releases of abiword are very rarely updated, if ever. For example Midnight Commander's team follow the workflow [1] to periodically release updated stable releases with backported fixes. Gnumeric [2] is also frequently releasing updates to 'stable' branch which makes it suitable for packaging. If we were still shipping abiword v2.8.6 there little we could do about existing bugs and perhaps if would be easier to leave the package poorly maintained. You know, few users can be happy if fix follows bug report 3...5 years later... Neither stability not quality of 2.8.6 was better than 2.9.2 and packaging of 2.9.2 helped to close over 40 bugs and enable unique collaborative editing features. Feedback was very positive. Personally I probably wouldn't use 2.8.6 at all because most appealing collaborative features become available in 2.9.2. Another important reason for packaging 2.9.2 is transition to GTK-3. Due to amount of GTK-related changes I found it particularly difficult to backport fixes. Also because of transition to GTK-3 I doubt if it would be possible to continue shipping 2.8.6. To summarise, our decisions to package development version was influenced by the following facts: * stable version is too old. * stable version is never (or extremely rarely) updated. * little difference in quality between stable and development but dev. version is easier to follow. In regards to updates 2.9.2 were not better than stable 2.8.6 - for example archive of 2.9.2 have missing file and 2.9.2.1 was never published. So I've decided to conservatively follow 'trunk' version and package 'trunk' snapshot shortly after 2.9.2. Worth mentioning that 'trunk' version have a particular moment in time represented by version 2.9.2 so fast-forwarding trunk just few weeks later allowed to accommodate post-2.9.2-release fixes and missing file. Here is when you started to receive some feedback and a small stream of patches from us including format-hardening patch and number of FTBFS patches for different architectures. This may not be happening if we didn't switch to 2.9.2. As you can see this was an effort to find a delicate balance between too old 'stable' and too fresh 'trunk' versions. There is always temptation to follow later 'trunk' snapshots but I was planning to conservatively stay behind and wait for next release. In April 2012 I was contacted by Ubuntu team who asked me to consider fast-forwarding 'trunk' to the end of March to accommodate recently introduced updates to translations. That's when I think I've made a mistake because due to reported problems in April's 'trunk' I had to go even further and package very recent 'trunk' version. (Although it doesn't excuse my poor decision it is worth noticing that Ubuntu team is sometimes impatiently snatch uploads to 'unstable' without waiting for migration to 'testing') I've learned the lesson and I apologise for the inconvenience. However because crashing was reported only recently, is there a possibility that problem is related to recent updates to 3rd party library? Such incidents are not uncommon for painful transition to GTK-3. In this case perhaps we can release update ASAP (unless we did it already). While I promise to release more conservatively I hope you might re-consider release strategy in order to make 'stable' version more suitable for packaging and for use. I invite you to share your ideas about what shall we do to ship better 'abiword' with Debian. Thank you for your effort, dedication and care. Regards, Dmitry. [1]: https://www.midnight-commander.org/wiki/ReleaseWorkflow [2]: http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/ On 14 June 2012 02:05, Hubert Figuière <h...@figuiere.net> wrote: > Package: abiword > Version: 2.9.2 > > > AbiWord follow a numbering scheme similar to Gnome or the Linux kernel. > Odd dot release are considered as developement / unstable and should NOT > be packaged as release-quality unlike Debian did causing every other > fork, including Ubuntu, to ship it, and causing LARGE SUPPORT BURDAIN > onto upstream that have to deal with the flow of self entitled users to > a fix of their favorite crasher that do not exist in the stable 2.8.6 > release. > > > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
