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

[From: Simon Pickering]

> > > 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 ?
> >
> > It is an unstable phase - that is the purpose of extras-devel.
> >
> > I think the interface Niels writes will give the developers 
> > more control so
> > some of the control issues will be mitigated.

Allowing developers to remove old versions of their packages would be
the best plan for cleaning up imo, though a check should be made and
presented to the users if anything in the repos depends on the exact
version they want to remove - then they can talk to whomever owns that
package and see why they are using that version, etc.

> To repeat myself, I would say that the promotion to -testing 
> should be the lib 
> maintainter's job. Unstable is unstable, no package should 
> pull in random 
> versions to other repositories. However, if deemed working 
> and already 
> in -testing, it is not a problem for another application to 
> auto-promote it. 

Interesting. I think that if a package uses some library and it works,
the whole lot should be pushed to testing. E.g. I've got a bunch of
mathematics libraries sitting in extras-devel for a lack of any
applications using them. When I upload Octave that will use them and
then they can all get promoted to extras-testing, but if someone else
compiles e.g. R, which will also use the same libraries, they should be
able to promote the whole lot if it all appears to work IMO.

But perhaps this is a problem with the way I use the repos?

With that said, it would probably be worth informing the maintainers of
any packages that are to be promoted so that they first know about it,
and secondly can stop the promotion if they know there's a problem.

Cheers,


Simon