Problems with clusters of related packages

Posted Sep 23, 2010 0:57 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Back when I tried running Debian testing, I had major difficulties whenever there was a Gnome transition (I think KDE had the same issue), in that packages would trickle in individually, resulting in a mostly unusable desktop because Gnome wouldn't really run with an arbitrary mix of older and newer packages with a few left out, regardless of what the dependencies say. It's been a while so maybe the Debian folks have figured out how to make this work better, but I somehow doubt it. Probably the only way to really get it right is to identify groups of packages that have to all move into testing together, even if the raw .deb dependencies say that there is more flexibility.

Problems with clusters of related packages

Posted Sep 23, 2010 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Np237 (guest, #69585) [Link]

Please dont hesitate to report such issues. It often happens that we miss some of the inter-package dependencies in unstable, and they get only noticed when the package enters testing.

This is where testing migration beats us hard, since the packages with fixed dependencies will not migrate until their dependencies do, so testing users remain screwed.

I feel this is one of the major challenges that needs to be dealt with by CUT.