Debian Developers - Re: Bug#238193: use debconf to manage permissions of ls-r not high-priority question

Author

Re: Bug#238193: use debconf to manage permissions of ls-r not high-priority question

Frank Küster

2004-03-16, 5:34 am

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:

>
>
> As usual, this question only exists because it masks a more insidious
> bug: there would be no reason to ask at all if the debconf support were
> actually policy-compliant in the handling of users' local configuration.

I am aware that we are not very good at this (but improving). But in
this particular case, could you please elaborate a little? Not only would we
have to safely figure out the "user's local configuration" - in this
case whether he manually set the permissions of the ls-R files. The
problem is also that upstream changed ls-R handling a couple of times.=20

On a fresh install (if the files simply don't exist) we needn't ask
anything, that's right. But if we do find something, I currently see no
easy way.

> This should, by all rights, be a "serious" bug, but I don't know whether
> it's realistic to consider this RC for sarge now that it's been ignored
> for so long.

The problem is that in fact we don't know whether sarge will be released
within weeks or months. Currently we are dividing our efforts between
the current packages with rather outdated tetex-2.0.2 and tetex-3.0
which will be released within the next weeks (in this case really 2-6
weeks, I'm sure).

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie

Frank Küster

2004-03-16, 5:35 am

Frank K=FCster <frank@debian.org> wrote, that's me:

> On a fresh install (if the files simply don't exist) we needn't ask
> anything, that's right. But if we do find something, I currently see no
> easy way.

Having looked again, it's probably not so hard. Still I'd like to hear
some more concrete critizism. I would like to be sure to really address
all your concerns and not create something else.

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie

Frank Küster

2004-03-16, 7:35 am

Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> schrieb:

> On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 10:28:56AM +0100, Frank K=FCster wrote:
er[color=darkred]
>
> I think it's a bad idea to try to get new major versions of major
> systems like tetex into sarge at the moment, and I think trying to do so
> is likely to delay sarge.

If we could be sure that sarge will be released, say, before July, I
would totally agree with you. But we can't, at least I don't know. If we
happen to release in October, base is frozen sometime in July, and other
stuff later in Summer, then I would find it hard to explain to users why
we didn't include tetex from March or early April.

I think what is delaying sarge is not that the evil maintainers ;-) of
$package try to get their new upstream version in. It's rather that they
don't know whether they should try to do so, or concentrate on fixing
bugs that will likely not occurr in new upstream at all.

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie

Atsuhito Kohda

2004-03-16, 11:38 am

From: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
Subject: Re: Bug#238193: use debconf to manage permissions of ls-r not high-priority question
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:27:15 +0000

> There will hopefully be another release update soon; we're holding
> reasonably to the last schedule posted on -devel-announce, although
> there are still a number of serious bugs in the base system that need to
> be ironed out and a few more architectures that need to be hammered into
> shape for d-i. In the meantime, it does make our lives harder in release
> planning when people drop in major new versions of major packages, and
> it makes it harder to get a freeze working.

Please don't be so anxious, we are not running into
teTeX 3.0

We don't want to see teTeX packages make sarge release
delayed but if sarge release would be so late we wouldn't
want to see obsolete teTeX in sarge ;)

Regards, 2004-3-17(Wed)

--
Debian Developer & Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@debian.org>
Department of Math., Univ. of Tokushima

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Frank Küster

2004-03-16, 1:38 pm

Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:

> There will hopefully be another release update soon; we're holding
> reasonably to the last schedule posted on -devel-announce,=20

Which was, IIRC, basically: Work hard on d-i, report on March 15, and
then we'll see. At least I don't remember any dates or even approximate
timelines.

> although
> there are still a number of serious bugs in the base system that need to
> be ironed out and a few more architectures that need to be hammered into
> shape for d-i.=20

So what does this mean? To me, it is still not clear whether this means
weeks or many months. Perhaps I could know better if I followed the
development of d-i closer. But in fact I'd rather spend my time fixing
bugs in my packages.

> In the meantime, it does make our lives harder in release
> planning when people drop in major new versions of major packages, and
> it makes it harder to get a freeze working.

Note that 80% of the work we've done on tetex-3.0 is related to
packaging bugs that also exist in our current packages, and can easily
be backported once it is clear that sarge will release soon.

Currently I don't dare install sarge on my working box because I cannot
be sure that there won't be a broken glibc, XFree86 or PERL one
day. Under these circumstances I don't feel much inclined to refrain
generally from including any other upstream version of a very-much-less
complicated package.=20

In fact we haven't discussed this on the teTeX maintainers list yet,
because the new packages simply are not in any shape, they don't even
install. But once they do, once we have categorized and verified our big
bunch of bugs (which would also be good for sarge, contain it 2.0.2 or
3.0), I would suggest to upload the new packages to experimental, and to
encourage packages maintainers of depending packages to work with
them. After that, we can discuss how far sarge is, and what to do next.

So don't panic. We won't throw in tetex-3.0 packages simply because
dpkg-buildpackage; echo $? says "0". But on the other hand, we do our
best to prevent sarge users from having a totally rotten TeX
installation.

I don't prepare those packages because I want them to be integrated into
sarge, I make them because I want good tetex-3.0 packages for Debian
users. I will make them also if I know that sarge users will have to use
backports.=20

Regards, Frank

--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie

Frank Küster

2004-03-17, 9:42 am

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 10:28:56AM +0100, Frank K=FCster wrote:
>
d we[color=darkred]
>
>
> Sorry, I guess I didn't read the debconf question closely enough -- I
> mistook it for one of the other questions that have existed in the past.
> If this is really just asking about managing the *permissions*, I can't
> see that asking the question is an RC bug. I do agree it probably
> doesn't need to be a high priority question.

I'll have a look at it.

> If by "weeks" you mean "less than a month", I think it's safe to say
> that at the current rate of progress, sarge will not be releasable in
> that time period. I'd love to be proven wrong by an *improvement* in
> the current rate of progress.

I count 1, 2, many. And anything below many months is weeks :-)

> But I definitely don't think it will take "many months", as you suggest
> in another message. I definitely think we should be able to get this
> release out before July. Our chances of achieving this are better if
> maintainers restrain themselves from uploading major changes to major
> packages over the next month or so.

I'm quite confident unstable won't see tetex-3 before May. And then it
seems testing won't, either.

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie