On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 01:42:20AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > I'm not sure where you get that from; woody was released July 20th last year, > which is a little over 3/4th of a year ago, and uploads were being accepted > into testing without special consideration up until pretty much a year ago > today. The libreadline-java from stable, for example, was uploaded on 19th > April 2002, eg. > > You can make claims about things like X being overly old (X 4.2 was > released January last year, we're shipping X 4.1 in woody), but that's > not really very meaningful when we're not shipping X 4.3 (released two > months ago) even in unstable.
Woody was effectively frozen around Jan 2002, no major changes to packages were permitted, etc. The fact that other distributions make releases 2 - 3 times a year and debian still does multi year releases ensures the users we have left, that aren't using it solely for servers where stability is paramount, will be using unstable. On a side note tracking bugs in testing would be interesting, because it is generally thought testing is more stable than unstable, but I doubt this is really the case. Right now we generally close a bug once it goes into unstable but that bug that was just fixed probably still exists in testing. > > wasn't as bad as before woody was released, when it was ~ 2.5 years old. > > If you're implying this isn't a good thing, and that we should be providing > current software that's bug free and reliable, you might like to consider > fixing all of: - snip my numerous RC bugs - I plan to work on them as soon as I graduate (which is in two weeks)... I closed quite a few bugs (RC and regular) when I had some free time earlier this month, I still have around 600 open bugs though. In general I don't think its a good idea for a package to having only one maintainer. It may work for smaller packages, but even then many times maintainers vanish or forget to update their packages. I think having a rcs system that contained all the packaging information required to build the entire distribution in one place that all DD's had access to (and actually used) would be a good thing. That along with a method of automatically determining which packages are out of date with upstream (possibly using a mandated watch file) could help to keep debian up to date. Having a centralized repo could also help with other things such as updating i18n templates, etc. (imho of course, ymmv) Chris
