On 2020-04-05 21:15 +0200, Marc Haber wrote: > having an obsolete version of the software distributed > with/through Debian is (rightfully) seen a liabilty by some upstreams, > not as an asset.
I think a more interesting/important question is whether users like it, rather than whether upstreams like it. Quite a lot of users just want to use stuff and so long as it works for their purposes they really don't know or care if it is 2 years old. I quite often find myself in this situation. Quite a lot of software is not something you want to care about - you just want to use it. Now of course things get sticky when the old version _doesn't_ work for the user's purpose (which happens sometimes) and they to go to bug upstream about the issue (rather than bugging debian). So long as most users will find it works for them, then I think it's still really useful for us to package stuff, because it's good for our users, whatever upstreams would prefer. What proprtion of users are likely to find a 2-yr old version satisfactory is a judgement for packagers (who will be left with the resulting bugs). In cases like this its also good to document that bugs should go to debian, not upstream, although of course not many people read docs so that won't work as well as one might like. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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