Other desktop support? [LWN.net]

Other desktop support?

Posted Jan 16, 2013 13:53 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720)
In reply to: Other desktop support? by mpr22
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Fedora 18 experience

OK, that's why you use testing, that's good enough, I have no problem with that at all.
I have yet to see why this imposes a freeze on unstable, on the other hand.

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Other desktop support?

Posted Jan 17, 2013 7:57 UTC (Thu) by DavidS (subscriber, #84675) [Link]

> I have yet to see why this imposes a freeze on unstable, on the other hand.

Because "unstable" is the place where stuff goes that should be released with the next stable. See Developer Reference 4.6.4.1:

> This development cycle is based on the assumption that the unstable
> distribution becomes stable after passing a period of being in testing.

-- http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/re...

Other desktop support?

Posted Jan 17, 2013 8:05 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I was under the illusion that you could change the developement branch of a project without impacting the other one.

Debian freezes

Posted Jan 18, 2013 6:30 UTC (Fri) by DavidS (subscriber, #84675) [Link]

Tl;dr:unstable is not a development branch, it is a integration branch. Experimental might be considered a development one.

Uploading to unstable publishes packages as "destined for stable". In the case of libraries, that also means that users of this library will start linking against the new binary. This again implies that the two packages now must go to testing together. This quickly leads to situations where significant parts of unstable cannot progress to testing due to issues in central packages (think gtk).
Building new packages against libraries from testing would reduce the formal requirements for testing propagation, but would lead to untested combinations in testing (as unstable users had a different version installed).

Debian freezes

Posted Jan 18, 2013 8:06 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Experimental is not a branch, it's not self contained (you cannot use only experimental, you need to have unstable as well).

> Building new packages against libraries from testing would reduce the formal requirements for testing propagation, but would lead to untested combinations in testing

But I'd prefer that. I still think that those who care about testing should be the ones testing it.