[Aptitude-devel] aptitude 0.6.9

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hello Daniel,

2012/7/1 Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com>:
> Hello all
>
> Too late for Wheezy, but 0.6.9 has been put up on mentors.

A word of advice.  Maybe you're not familiar with freezes from the
packaging point of view, so here are some hints that may be useful.  I
don't have lots of experience either, so maybe Axel, Christian or
other people will correct me.

I think that if you *want* 0.6.9 in wheezy and ask the release team
for "freeze exceptions" today or in the next few days (e.g., 10 days,
so all buildds finish and some days of margin for bugs), they will
grant it.

If one wants a freeze exception for libraries that would cause package
transitions due to source incompatibilities and so on, or new versions
of KDE|GNOME, it would be pretty difficult; but since aptitude is a
standalone and relatively straightforward package, accepting a new
minor version early in the freeze doesn't tend to cause big problems.

OTOH, and this is quite important, introducing new versions in
unstable while in freeze, is not recommended.  If somebody sponsors
0.6.9 (and possibly .10, etc in the next few weeks/months) for
unstable but you don't ask it to be accepted in testing; and then
there's a RC bug affecting testing (and with changes in multiarch and
so on, they can be hairy); release managers won't easily accept 0.6.9+
versions (unless, again, is very early in the process) and fixing
problems will generally be more problematic.

So I'd say that the better solution is to either:

a) upload soon and ask for freeze exception also
ASAP-with-some-days-of-margin (if RC bugs start to be reported against
that version, it will be difficult to convince release managers)

b) do not upload 0.6.9 to unstable, either hold changes for after the
release or in experimental.  But then, RC bugs in testing-freezed will
have to be fixed separately, so you will need to support two branches,
which is always more cumbersome/painful.


Cheers.