Re: Debian's glacial movement--a rant
- From: John W Foster <jfoster81747@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:19:18 -0500
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 13:06 -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
Michael Biebl wrote:It would appear to me that you only have three options:
Freddy Freeloader wrote:Not at all. I'm saying because of how far Debian is behind in versions
Hi
I've never been pissed off at Debian before but I guess there is always
a first.
That's usually not a good way to start a discussion (admitted, you said it's a
rant, but aI'll try to answer anyway).
I'm experiencing a bug in Gnucash that appeared a couple of days ago on
my system that makes Gnucash completely unusable for me. I turned in a
bug report on Friday, checked on it yesterday, and by today the bug had
been blocked from being displayed. It could be found by searching
Debian's bug tracker, but only if you know the bug id number. If you
just search for bugs in Gnucash the bug does not appear to exist.
The bug was closed, and blocked, because it's been fixed upstream in
version 2.2.9 which was released by Gnucash in February of this year.
Older bugs that have been fixed are automatically archived, so no longer show up
by default. The bts allows you though, to show both archived and unarchived bug
reports. If you are using the web frontend, scroll down to the bottom.
Great. The bug has been fixed. Why it needed to be hidden from being
displayed is puzzler for me, but that's the way it is.
Now the bad news.
Since Gnucash in both Sid and Sqeeze is now at version 2.2.6 I only have
to wait until Debian works through versions 2.2.7 and 2.2.8 before
Gnucash in Debian finally becomes usable for me again in version
2.2.9. As Sid is "only" 9 months behind Gnucash's release schedule at
this point I guess the fact that all my business records for the last
couple of years are in Gnucash means I'll be able to start doing my
business accounting again sometime after the first of next year, at a
minimum, if I wait for Debian....
so what is your point? Do you think the bug report was not correctly handled by
the maintainer?
of Gnucash it's going to be unusable by me at least until next year if
Debian stays at its current time lag behind Gnucash releases. As I
have all my business records stored in Gnucash this is a major problem
for me.
This isn't aimed at any one developer. It's just a commentary on how
Debian moves forward. And, that's not always a bad thing. In most
cases it's fine as it means stable is exactly that in all meanings of
the word, but in this instance this really bites me in a bad way.
About my only choices are to spend a couple of days rebuilding and
restoring my system with a Lenny install, or moving to a distro that has
the current version of Gnucash.
Part of this is also Gnucash's responsibility because 2.2.9 is built
against glib >= 2.6. Not many distro's are using that version of glib,
so it doesn't seem to me to make a whole lot of sense if they want the
latest versions of their software to be used. That decision practically
guarantees that their a lot of their bug fixes won't be available for
the better part of a year to most Linux users.
You can't even compile from source because of it unless you want to
start making what are risky changes for most users. I certainly
couldn't predict what upgrading glib to version 2.6 would do to my
system.
I've been using Debian now for almost 6 years, with a lot of that time
spent running testing or unstable on my desktop, and this is the first
time I've run across a bug that makes a package I depend on for my
business unusable for approximately a year. I find that to be a big
problem.
If you don't think that would be a problem worthy of a rant for you,
well, what can I say? You must be the worlds most patient man.
Could you please point us to the relevant bug number.
Michael
1. Roll your own and use the basic tarball to do so. keeping it outside
of Debian. The issue with that is orphaned libs and apps with no way to
manage them.
2. Roll your own with "checkinstall" a better choice in my opinion. It
will eliminate the 'orphaning' mentioned above. I actually compiled and
have running a full BRL-CAD suit using checkinstall on Debian,Lenny.
3. Switch to a more easy to manage situation of book keeping.
I use MoneyDance, a commercial program that runs as a java app for
handling all my banking and financial needs. I also use SQL-Ledger from
Debian to do my real accounting and business management functions.
These have been doing the job for me for several versions of Debian with
little effect from any upgrades. I did have a problem with the gcj stuff
2 upgrades ago. Nothing since. I have run these on unstable systems as
well with no real issues, so it really does not matter which version is
used, since they run under interpreted systems. i.e. java and php.
What I can tell you is that a rant about any package maintainers efforts
is not going to improve the situation. If you do not want to take charge
of the situation and do something about it, then you have no alternative
except wait until things catch up. The real reasons why most of us stick
with Debian is this list and the help it provides & the reliability of a
well proved system of developing software that is extremely useful in
production environments.
Good luck in resolving your frustrations!
--
John Foster
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