GetDeb Project

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday 16 October 2007 16:52, João Pinto wrote:

top posting fixed.

> 2007/10/16, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>:
> > By policy (given out by the Ubuntu Tech Board) backports only come from
> > the
> > developmental repository.  I don't understand why you keep wanting to
> > bypass
> > that step.  The packaging standards for backports are the same as for
> > regular
> > Ubuntu development repositories.
> >
> > What would uploading packages for automated building accomplish?
> >
> > Scott K

> Hello,
> That policy is development oriented. Our target is the "current" release.
>
> A backport may be complex or not, it may even be impossible (it may depend
> on core library upgrades), making sure a package can be successfully build
> and successfully runs on both development and current, requires twice the
> time for the reviewing (which is the most important process), we have a
> large requests queue already, we can't afford that extra effort.

For virtually all backports a package from the development release can be 
built and used in the current release.  So far I've only seen one source 
backport (where the source package needs to be changed) for Feisty from 
Gutsy.  For a well designed package the extra effort is nil.

> Our focus is the current release version, not the development version, for
> the development version there is already the MOTU team which does have much
> more human resources and which does a great job.

Well we could certainly use more help.  Getting things into the developemental 
release and then backporting only need add a few days to the process.  Both 
could be served for essentially the same effort.

> Uploading to the automated system would guarantee that you would get all
> the packages that we produce, I understood that your main concern is that
> we also provide packages to the official repositories, on this case because
> we work with current version, it would be for backports.

If you could get the Tech Board to buy off on that, then it could be 
considered, but there would still have to be a packaging review which is the 
majority of the delay regardless of if you are targeting the current release 
or the development release.

Having done both a fair amount of backporting and packaging for developmental 
releases, I don't understand your objection.  In practice the problems you 
raise just don't come up very often.

I understand you have a nice web front end (and that's fine).  My concern is 
that you are producing duplicate packages when if we were working together we 
could get more done.  You keep saying you want to work together, but that you 
won't.  I don't understand which you want.

Are you going to remove gnucash from getdeb now that you know it's available 
through backports?

Scott K