Bug#826090: mate-terminal broken after todays upgrade (debian testing)

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 06/02/2016 05:09 PM, Santiago Vila wrote:
> The testing ditribution is supposed to be in an always releseable state.

That is correct. But this particular fact is something that is inevitable
and extremely hard to sort out. Also, the always releasable state is
more related to RC bugs, not to testing being able for immediate
release.

More precisely, it should be called "always freezable state", not "always
releasable state". The latter is currently not really possible with the
tools have.

> If something does not work in *testing*, then of course it is a bug,
> and you don't have to blame the submitter for that.

Except that this particular problem can not be avoided.

> Reporting bugs about things which do not work in *testing* is a
> completely acceptable use of the bug system, it's not abuse in any
> way.

No, not in this particular way and not from people who apparently
don't understand how things work.

> To avoid what you call "artifacts" happening in testing we have a
> thing called "transitions" and that's also why we sometimes submit
> serious bugs against packages or group of packages in unstable just to
> avoid them entering testing when they are not ready for testing.

Those transitions happen in unstable, not in testing. MATE was
completely installable in unstable, shortly after src:marco was
marked as ACCEPT.

I'm not aware of any transition mechanism for testing. Please educate me.

> But apparently you people didn't do anything like that (or you didn't
> do it right enough) and this time packages which do not work together
> have entered testing at the same time.
> 
> Again, this is not supposed to happen in *testing*.

But it happens and is a non-issue for anyone who knows how testing
and unstable work. Both distributions are development releases
and not for production use. Heck, testing doesn't even get
reliable security support.

> For the record: As of today, none of the following source packages in
> stretch may be built in stretch due to unmet build-dependencies:

We have never built packages in testing. All packages have "unstable"
in the changelog. Uploading things directly into testing is possible
during freeze only and only if there is absolutely no way around it.

> Now you can say that I also don't understand how testing/unstable
> works but that would be really funny indeed:
> 
> Packages in testing MUST build in testing. This is non-negotiable,
> it's in the list of things that release managers consider release
> critical, and it's also one of the reasons packages are sometimes
> removed from testing.
> 
> To summarize: There seems to be a *real* mess in the MATE packages in
> testing, and the list of packages I can't build is a clear evidence of that.
> 
> Please try to find the real root of the problem, how it happened, and
> how we could have avoided it to happen in *testing* by using serious
> bugs wisely, and please do not blame users for submitting bugs about
> things that do not work in testing, because testing is supposed to
> work without "artifacts".

No. Just stop expecting testing to be a production system. It's not
my job to be someone's personal IT expert to help them resolve problems
when using a development release.

There is tons of stuff that breaks like this and there is absolutely
no point in investing manhours into problems which resolve automatically
over the time span of a few days.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913