Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Posted Mar 6, 2012 21:24 UTC (Tue) by alvieboy (guest, #51617)
Parent article: Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Sounds indeed like Democracy to me.

I'm glad this finally moves on.

However, I can understand Guillem. I also develop and maintain a packaging system myself, and I'm not very open when it comes to change it, for the sake of stability. But sometimes we have to do it, and the first thing we need to do is to convince ourselves that those changes are indeed a necessary move. This is why I think Guillem did not accept them, he is not convinced they are necessary or that they lack the required quality (I think the former, but I might be wrong).

Still, he seems to have been forced to accept those changes. This will eventually cause a bigger problem, cause you cannot properly maintain something you don't agree with.

Hopefully Debian will manage to overcome this, and so Guillem. Let's hope they do, for the sake of their users (like myself).

Alvie

Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Posted Mar 7, 2012 8:54 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (3 responses)

The "experimental" distribution exists for exactly this reason: testing out changes too dangerous to put in unstable (where they could otherwise potentially filter into testing and stable assuming no release-critical bugs). Objecting to an upload to unstable would seem very reasonable and appropriately cautious. However, uploading to experimental makes a lot of sense, as a way to let developers start testing out the functionality, reporting bugs, and figuring out how to make their packages work with it.

Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Posted Mar 7, 2012 10:50 UTC (Wed) by stefanor (subscriber, #32895) [Link] (2 responses)

Practically, experimental is normally a staging area, rather than testing ideas. Guillem still had doubts about the design of multi-arch and, I presume, didn't want developers to adapt their packages to a multi-arch implementation that wouldn't be compatible with the final form.

Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Posted Mar 10, 2012 17:31 UTC (Sat) by mv (subscriber, #17258) [Link] (1 responses)

This follow-up may be interesting. Besides announcing an upload of multiarch capable dpkg to unstable, Guillem points out some results from the code review.

Getting multiarch dpkg into Debian

Posted Mar 11, 2012 22:15 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Yes, it is really interesting, and it gives a new perspective on the whole article: the version of dpkg in experimental may cause db corruption.