Re: Slang has too many bugs

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi!

El dc. 18 de 11 de 2020 a les 12:04 +0100, en/na Benno Schulenberg va
escriure:
> Hi Jordi,
> 
> Good to hear from you!  I was beginning to think that the pandemic...
> :/

Ugh, no, just not a lot of time for even some of the basics like
replying to email. Sorry!

> Op 17-11-2020 om 18:11 schreef Jordi Mallach:
> > Right. I agree that Slang should be EOL for nano.
> 
> Okay.
> 
> > I agree. I'll talk to the d-i maintainer to see if it's realistic
> > to
> > switch to ncurses for bullseye, but I assume it's not as we're
> > nearing
> > the freeze and this is quite a low level change that would affect
> > cdebconf as well.
> 
> It will not be necessary to immediately switch all the installer
> stuff
> over to ncurses -- it would be enough to first just switch nano over.
> That would already be an improvement: it would make nano work
> correctly
> also in the non-graphical installer, so it could be considered a
> plain
> bug fix.

Right, but as d-i strives to be as small as possible, I assume the
maintainer will want to keep either ncurses or slang. But yes,
objectively the size increase is really minimal and brings in
improvements.

> > So, I wonder if you can consider holding with the slang support
> > until
> > no more nano new versions can transition to debian testing, or else
> > we'll have to go with the last version supporting slang for the
> > bullseye stable release.
> 
> Hmmm...  Let's compromise: I'll keep Slang support around in the next
> release (5.4, sometime this year), and then remove it.  If afterward
> a
> serious bug is found and fixed, I'll provide a patch for 5.4 (if
> Debian
> hasn't started to use ncurses for nano in the installer).  What do
> you
> say?

If you're ok with Debian not shipping 5.5 or 5.6 or whatever is the
current version when the freeze is effective, I'm ok with it.

Just waiting a couple more months would probably be easier for Ubuntu
too, though, as they normally pull from unstable, not experimental.


Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Debian Project