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Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp
From: |
Thomas Weber |
Subject: |
Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp) |
Date: |
Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:23:37 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) |
On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:56:18AM +0100, Søren Hauberg wrote:
> fre, 13 02 2009 kl. 10:31 +0100, skrev Rafael Laboissiere:
> > Putting my Debian package maintainer hat on , I must say that we (the DOG,
> > Debian Octave Group) have been doing this kind of "stable bug fixing" work
> > for the Debian packages since ages. Indeed, it is a lot of work, but we need
> > to close the bug reports that are filed against our packages by our users.
> >
> > I tend to agree with Thomas that is is important to provide a stable branch
> > that is alive and as bug-free as we can. However, I also agree with John
> > that this is a time sink for the upstream developers. On the other hand, if
> > people with enough free time are willing to do it, like Jaroslav recently,
> > why not do it? Of course, porting fixes from the development branch must be
> > done with extreme care. This is what we usually do in the DOG.
>
> I'm saying this, without knowing anything about anything, so feel free
> to consider this pure bullshit...
>
> If the DOG is doing this kind of work, why can't you guys just be the
> release managers for the stable series? It just sounds like there is a
> large overlap between maintaining the stable branch and maintaining
> Octave in a distribution.
There is at least one reason why I don't like such a proposal (and they
are different from Rafael's). First, I believe that an original software
maintainer should almost *never* be a package maintainer for a
distribution. Such things result in conflicts of interests. Example: We
had a bug in Debian that the uninstall process of an octave-forge
package failed. It turned out that pkg.m throws an error when called
without an existing /usr/share/octave/packages directory (we come to
this situation as the Debian package manager dpkg removes the then empty
directory /usr/share/octave/packages)
>From a distributions point of view, that is a bug. I'm not so sure about
Octave. It's a valid point of view to say that calling 'pkg rebuild'
with a non-existing /u/s/o/p directory is a user-error.
A different point of view are platforms. I use Linux almost exclusively,
so I don't really care about other platfoms (ignoring that I have no
chance to actually test an installation on a Windows system).
Thomas
- patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), (continued)
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), Søren Hauberg, 2009/02/12
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), John W. Eaton, 2009/02/12
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), Rafael Laboissiere, 2009/02/13
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), Søren Hauberg, 2009/02/13
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), Rafael Laboissiere, 2009/02/13
- bug tracking (was: Re: patching the stable branch (was: ...)), John W. Eaton, 2009/02/13
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp),
Thomas Weber <=
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), Thomas Weber, 2009/02/14
- Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp), John W. Eaton, 2009/02/14