Dear developers, I hope, this might be the right list, to start a new discussion. Additionally this also should read developers and ftp-masters, as theire word has great weight.
Well, I want to like to suggest, to slightly change the policy for debian/stable. Please let me explain. In the past years I am using debian (now for more than 8 years), there always was a problem with debian/stable whenever things changed, and new versions of applications or libs were not allowed to enter in stable. Doing so, all people using stable were not able to use theire programms before, as things changed. Among a lot of examples, just let me pick one to explain, I choose "Pidgin" (kopete, as well) As yahoo and ICQ protocols were changed, pidgin was released in a new version with new libs. Everything went fine for testing and unstable users, but stable users could not use pidgin or kopete any more. Such things happen and will happen in our fast changing times again and again, and IMO especially stable-users want a system that is running stable. But debian policy is causing more trouble than expected. I also think, that major changes in applications (here are especially kde, gnome, Openoffice.org in my mind) should also beeing transferred to debian/stable when they are running stable enough or the current versions are out-of-state-of-the-art. Mentioning KDE (just as an example), IMO 2 years of waiting is a likttle bit too long, as a) every distribution has already KDE4 since a long time, b) KDE4 was running for a long, long time very stable and c) KDE3 was already for a long long time much obsolete. (the same things are at OpenOffice.org-2.4.1 from stable- obsolete, unmodern, bad usable due to obsolete/worse import/export filters) Please try to understand my extensions (and do not blame me, I am using testing for myself), but I think stable-users should not to be forced to choose between obsolete/not working applications or update the whole system. There should be better way (without dealing with apt-pinning or similar), my idea and suggestion is, just to transfer necessary newer versions (and hand- picked) of libs and applications to stable. But that would require the change of the debian policies (and of course the agreement of users, developers and ftp-masters). I will be pleased if my suggestion is worth to start a discussion of it. Thank you very much for reading this and all the work in the best distribution ever. Happy hacking! Hans-J. Ullrich -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201102141858.29217.hans.ullr...@loop.de
