Re: Packages temporarily disappearing from Testing/Lenny

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:20:00PM +0200, David wrote:
Hi again list, and thanks for the replies.

My PC survived the upgrade to Unstable and actually has fewer problems
than I did with Testing (besides a few xorg.conf and nvidia-xconfig
issues, and 2 gtk libraries being held back due to dependancy
problems).

A follow-up for those packages I mentioned:

xmms - Removed because it is old and unmaintained, has dependancy
problems. I had problems with audacious/testing, but
audacious/unstable works great and looks just like XMMS (with the
Refugee skin). Also it seems to have remote control functionality
(dbus) which I need at work for it to be a replacement for XMMS.

Debian from time to time needs to drop things like libraries to keep it
maintainable. Having 7 different versions of a particular
language|library is untenable (python 1.0, 2.0, ...). So in this case
XMMS used gtk 1 which is being phased-out and gtk 2 will be used thus
forward. IIRC some folks where considering upgrading XMMS to use gtk 2.
This would be a way to get XMMS back into Debian.


nvidia-glx (nvidia-graphics-drivers) - An old version was sitting in
Testing for months. It was never updated in unstable because the
updated versions have a lot of bug reports, and also because they want
kernel module packages which were never uploaded (presumably because
users can make them with modula-assistant). Eventually, a newer
package linux-2.6 (which had dependancy issues with the old
nvidia-graphics-drivers) moved to Testing, which kicked
nvidia-graphics-drivers out of Testing.

comix - The version in Testing had security problems, so it was
removed automatically (however, the insecure version stayed in
Unstable). Almost a month later a fixed version was uploaded to stable
and 10 days later it moved to Testing.

Overall, I get the impression that Testing is a very good staging area
for the next Stable, but it can be a 2nd-class citizen (compared to
Stable and Unstable) for end-users, with packages getting very out of
date or even disappearing from time to time. I need to keep this in
mind for the future.

David.


In general, bug-fixes are sent to unstable. After some testing they are
sent to testing. If a problem occurs, the testing package is removed and
at some point another unstable package will replace it. When all the
pacakges in testing are capable of working together and have no release
critical bugs, the whole becomes stable. The point is that package need
lots of testing which takes a lot of time (18 months). This means that
stable (and testing which will become stable) are at least 18 months
old. And unstable which gets the updates will be very new all the time.
if you want to see this in a graph, check out my web site below and view
the diagram.
-K
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