* Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> [250724 10:38]:
On Wed, 23 Jul 2025 at 23:53:58 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Is it forbidden for packages to exist in unstable and/or experimental
only in Debian?
It is allowed. firefox (the non -esr version) and wine-development are
examples of packages that exist only in unstable (with a RC bug to
stop them from migrating to testing), while libsdl3-mixer and openjk
are examples of packages that exist only in experimental.
Packages that exist in unstable will frequently be picked up by other
distributions and included in their ostensibly stable releases, often
automatically and often ignoring RC bugs (the most obvious example is
Ubuntu universe, which automatically includes every package from
Debian unstable at the time of Ubuntu's freeze unless specifically
configured not to), so I would recommend experimental for this
purpose.
Also for Debian itself it is beneficial if such packages don't land
in unstable. For one, it avoids other packages using them to build
(when they then cannot migrate). And it keeps the QA list down.
Thanks,
Chris
