A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Liam Proven]

2009/3/9 Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>:

> Over time we have been cranking up the amount of automatic testing we do
> of this kind of thing. I think it nowadays involves some tentacled
> madness that installs a random selection of packages on each iteration
> and then complains if the upgrade breaks ...

My suggestion, to try to reproduce the sort of problems I've seen, would be :

 - get some idea of the most popular packages /not/ included in the
repositories but commonly added by users (perhaps by a poll on the
website/forums/mailing lists) - e.g., for 8.10, OpenOffice 3.0,
Thunderbird, Songbird, the non-open-source edition of VirtualBox (to
name some I use) & how people install them (e.g. from a DEB from
getdeb.net, from source, from a tarball, etc.)

 - additionally, possibly, that noted screwer-over of Ubuntu,
Automatix and its successors

- and perhaps a random /removal/ of packages, for things with popular
alternatives - perhaps removing Firefox in favour of
Epiphany/Seamonkey/Opera/Konqueror, or removing Pidgin in favour of
Empathy, or removing Evolution in favour of Thunderbird/mutt/Opera
M2/whatever

And add those as test cases.

Those seem to me to be the deal-breakers. I've been lucky - I've not
had problems with proprietary drivers breaking things since the days
of the nVidia Legacy Cards driver, which caused lots of problems on
Ubuntu/Mint/Freespire and other distros. IIRC only Mandriva, Suse and
Xandros handled it with relative aplomb or simply refused to install
it at all.



-- 
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