Re: debian/ in GNOME CVS

[Ian McKellar <yakk eavel com>]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 07:12:56AM +0800, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 12:18:09AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > Christian Marillat - GNOME's Debian packaging dude - is kindly helping us
> > with the platform alpha by packaging it all up for release into sid. This
> > means that we'll have a lot of Debian users with immediate access to
> > binaries for testing, bug reporting, general complaining, etc. This is
> > assuredly a Good Thing. :)
> 
> Does this really achieve any goal (releasing into sid)? The list of
> packages proposed for the alpha platform release is a bunch of libraries
> and no applications. Now, I realise that people can probably go crazy
> then building stuff from CVS since Jacob and others are porting like
> crazy on some fundamental stuff and others may soon follow. But, by
> default there's nothing to see if you aren't an active porter at the
> moment.

Perhaps this will encourage more active porters :)

Perhaps it'll encourage us all to stabilize the platform quickly (I know I'm
very guilty of dragging my feet - because basically nobody is using it yet).
> 
> My worry here is that something which is really "libraries for
> developers only and is for API stability to help porting begin" may be
> misinterpreted as a GNOME 2.0 pre-release or something equally
> confusing if people get it by default the next time they do a
> "run-magic-program-that-installs-stuff-from-the-net-on-my-Debian-box".
> Are we ready to handle that kind of PR?

I think so. Sid is the bleeding-edge-unstable debian anyway. Its basically
for the kind of people that run stuff out of CVS anyway. I know before I
had eazel-hacking I tried to run some GNOME stuff out of CVS and some stuff
out of Debian packages. If we can make that easiser for people then thats
a good thing. Remember that most GNOME application developers probably don't
have GNOME CVS accounts and have to use anoncvs when they update. We want
these people to be able to easilly move to the 2.0 platform.

Ian