Backports could be the default [LWN.net]

Backports could be the default

Posted Jul 28, 2008 21:38 UTC (Mon) by edmundo (guest, #616)
In reply to: Debian Lenny frozen by ametlwn
Parent article: Debian Lenny frozen

What I really mean is, they should freeze libraries and other packages that many other
packages depend on much earlier than they freeze packages which are just applications that
almost nothing depends on.

Does anything seriously depend on OpenOffice.org, for example?

Also, if there is some doubt about whether a major new release of some application is stable
enough, could they include both the old and the new versions in the release?

I'm sure these suggestions have been made before, but I'd be grateful for the standard
response.

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Backports could be the default

Posted Jul 28, 2008 22:23 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

They do that already, libraries were frozen earlier.

The point of stable release is that all the software have been successfully tested together to
be working in a rather fluent way. That's why it's also risky to provide newer versions of
applications into a released stable release.

Maintaining both old and new version of some software has been done before, like with Octave,
but of course it requires a _lot_ of maintenance. There's eg. hardly enough resources to do
single OpenOffice.org version maintaining/testing at the moment, so it would definitely
require several committed volunteers to even think of eg. OOo 3.0 kind of cases provided as an
alternative version.

http://backports.org/ is there to provide some packages a bit more unofficially, ie. they do
not come with the usual kind of guarantee of quality.