[maemo-community] Periodic cleanup of Extras-Devel?

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Thursday 14 January 2010 20:30:18 Anderson Lizardo wrote:
> Unfortunately I think there is a BIG open question that needs fixing
> before doing anything like this: new bindings not used by any
> application yet remain in extras-devel until some application depends
> on it and that application is promoted to extras (taking the binding
> together with it).
>
> The same apply to newer versions of PyMaemo packages, that are still
> only in extras-devel because no package *explicitely* depends on it
> yet.
>
> The current QA policy (and confirmed by Niels (IIRC) when I asked on
> -developers) is to NOT manually promote non user/* packages to
> extras-testing.
>
> So any periodic purge of extras-devel would destroy such packages.
>
> Any ideas?

Am I the only one who sees potential problem swith this ? How is a developer 
to know whether a library he's using in extras-devel is just waiting for 
something to pull it into testing or if it's in an unstable phase ? Another 
problem is that all the apps promoted would pull in their respective versions 
of the lib into -testing, which might cause an even bigger mayhem - an app 
gets tested with foolib 1.0, but before the 10 days are up, foolib 1.1 lands 
in testing (pulled in from by another app). Unless the original app had a '=' 
dependency (BAD BAD BAD !) this will mean testers will test the app with 
separate versions of foolib, or, worse yet, if it lands after 10 thumbs ups, 
promotion could pull in foolib 1.1 in Extras even though it might be totally 
broken. I would still think that it's the lib maintainer's choice when to 
promote a certain lib to testing (promoting to Extras proper is a different 
issue).

Regards,
Attila