[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Remco Rijnders) wrote: >I have my apt sources list pointed at tracking the "testing" release >of Debian. As I understand it this is supposed to be a repository of >the latest packages that have been used without major problems in >unstable for an 'x' number of days. > >Provided the assumption above is correct, why is PHP4 not in this >collection?
That's not quite all that's necessary. A more precise definition of "major problems" there is that none of the binary packages generated from the source package may have any release-critical bugs (i.e. bugs of severity serious, grave, or critical). Also, it must be in sync on all Debian's architectures: that doesn't mean it necessarily has to be built for all those architectures, but on the architectures where it has been built it must stay in sync. All its dependencies must have satisfied these conditions and made it into testing, too. And the version of the package that's a candidate for being installed into testing must have been in unstable for a certain amount of time. php4 is a large and fairly complex package, and it wouldn't surprise me if it failed at least one of these. The exact reasons can be found in the output from the testing scripts at http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/ (particularly update_excuses.html), although the output is rather cryptic and you have to know how to read it. I'd have a look for you, but ftp-master seems to be down at the moment, so I'll try again later. The maintainer is probably the best person to try to sort out any problems; after that, debian-devel is more likely to be read by more of the relevant people than debian-user. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
