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  • From: Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] My resignation
  • Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2012 08:56:22 +0200

Am Sat, 21 Jul 2012 22:02:44 -0400
schrieb Sukneet Basuta <sukneet AT gmail.com>:


> I have been using Arch Linux for longer than I have Source Mage, and
> it's still the main distro on my laptop. I can honestly say I've never
> had any stability problems with it.

I never went far enough with Arch to judge stability ... I was quickly
put off by having to configure extra community repos to get a sensible
software selection (along with the inconvenience that this stuff isn't
integrated well in the package management). But that's going off topic

> When do you think its okay to update a spell? To me, it makes the most
> sense to use the most current version of an application, since they
> generally have bug-fixes and such.

I want to chip in here, as I asked Vlad about that: To claify: His
complaint is mainly about infrastructure spells that others depend
upon. The new version of a library might be improved and stable, but
still break depending applications. Just happened with the gtkmm stuff
on my latest update --- they decided to be stricter about what headers
are allowed to be included by clients. This was resolved by updating
the whole stack of the stuff (in the right order), so it was really my
fault for not updating regularily, but it it illustrates that one has to
ensure that the whole shebang works, not just the lib itself.

End-user applications are easier: You just have to check that the
app itself works properly and I agree that we generally want the latest
(stable) release here. Care must be taken if the end-user program is
also used by other apps (frontends, etc).

> As I said, I'm working on devel-xorg, but even when I'm done it won't
> still won't be tested up to your standards.

Isn't Xorg a buggy hell since many years now, regardless of how well
the magician does craft the spells? ;-)

> I always thought that the compromise was the test and stable
> grimoires. I used to think the idea was that test was to test
> up-to-date software, and not guaranteed to be stable. Why bother
> having a stable branch otherwise?

I think that works for end-user applications; we have a little time to
pass before they go live for everyone. Stuff like glibc or possibly
incompatible updates of Gtk stack need extra verification and
more time. Especially glibc ... I wonder if all apps are safe now for
the changed memcpy behaviour with overlap that came with 2.12.

In any case, couldn't we get something like Prometheus up again? Simple
stuff like checking if every dependendant still builds should be
automatic.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

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