[IAEP] activites known not to either work at all or not on certin platforms

[Jonas Smedegaard]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi David (and others),

[quotes reordered to not use TOFU[1] ]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 09:38:20AM +0100, David Van Assche wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 01:16:19PM +0100, David Van Assche wrote:
>>>yes u are absolutly right... 0.84 is the focus now of every distro 
>>>(maybe excepting debian)
>>
>> Focus for Debian is latest upstream stable release, which means 0.84 
>> when that is released.

>you mean lenny+1 then.... so we'lll see sugar 0.84 in debian in about 
>1.5 years?

No. This is what you can expect with our current packaging logic:

  * Debian stable: Stable Sugar released 3-6 months ago
  * Debian testing: Stable Sugar released 1-2 months ago
  * Debian unstable: Stable Sugar released 1-4 weeks ago

Debian stable is comparable to Ubuntu "Long Term Support" releases.
Debian testing is comparable to normal Ubuntu releases.



Currently only stable Sugar is packaged. Here's why:

Debian branches refer to quality of the mix, not package quality:
  1) unstable: latest packages thrown together
  2) testing: latest set of packages tested together for 10 days
  3) stable: latest set of packages considered stable together

The branches are chained. An unstable package added to the "unstable" 
branch will be just as unstable when later reaching the "stable" branch 
(if getting there at all): Packages are not[2] injected directly into 
"testing" or "stable"!

Imagine - as now - we have 0.82.x packages in testing and put 0.83.x 
packages in unstable. If then a bug was discovered in a 0.82.x package, 
we could not fix it, as 0.82.x+1 would be lower than 0.83.x in unstable. 
If it was a severe bug, then 0.82.x would not reach stable.


Currently, only a single set of Sugar packages is maintained for Debian: 
The package "sugar-core" means "latest stable sugar-core".

We intend to extend routines to handle multiple concurrent package set, 
so package "sugar-core-0.82" means "latest 0.82.x sugar-core", 
and package "sugar-core-0.83" means "latest 0.83.x sugar-core".

With that scheme in place, you can expect the following:
  * Debian stable: Stable+unstable Sugar released 3-6 months ago
  * Debian testing: Stable+unstable Sugar released 1-2 months ago
  * Debian unstable: Stable+unstable Sugar released 1-4 weeks ago

We might even keep older releases maintained for Debian-based 
deployments still using e.g. 0.82.x in 2 years from now.

With multiple concurrent package sets, each upstream branch would go 
through the Debian chain of branches independently from each other, so 
e.g. 0.83.x would not block updates to 0.82.x, and 0.83.x would be 
available to Sugar developers through Debian "testing" even if 0.83.x 
would never make it into Debian "stable".



>> (trying, like Ubuntu, to be ahead of its upstreams cause complex 
>> problems when upstreams then take a different path than was guessed)

>P.S. The worst thing right now would be a fork from Debian for Ubuntu. 
>We'd loose devs, credibility, major problems later down with a 
>remerge... please lets try and find a way to get ubuntu being what it 
>really is, a mature resposible Debian child.

Ubuntu *is* a fork. A fundamental "feature" of Ubuntu is to be ahead of 
Debian while promoting itself as mature and responsible.



Kind regards,

  - Jonas


[1] More on TOFU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOFU

[2] Except for security-related bugfixes.

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

   [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkmUHF4ACgkQn7DbMsAkQLiQ3ACfeT4BQzE9uKfq6q8Pdv9g302p
tJgAn24k7qmfkSz8le5eNRA9vF4vhQV2
=nfgg
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----