Debconf 7 - First impression
By gildor on Saturday, June 16 2007, 23:47 - Permalink
Today i attend two talks : HP relationship with Debian, DAK future direction.
The talk about DAK led me to meet some known people in a technical background. Many ideas were exchanged and in particular one about the possibility to create staging area into experimental! I think this should be really great and would enable debian to do things in a more team synchronized manner.
Going back to my own experiment, with ocaml packaging, i think this should really help ocaml people to do more soft transition. The big problem of team work is that their playground is unstable. There should be no problem concerning that -- expect when you need to do big transition that will break most of the team maintained packages. For example, uploading new OCaml package will break almost all OCaml library packages. You must at least binNMU all packages and most of the time you have to patches/upload new upstream. This transition make all the ocaml packages uninstallable/unusable for a time. This can be quite long when there is big problem with particular package (thinking of coq and mldonkey).
People should also consider the fact that this kind of staging area must:
- be easy to setup (just give a name and a list of GPG key of people that are allowed to upload)
- configure a list of arch to build (for team maintained package, chances are that you have at least i386, amd64, ppc)
- define a shorter delay for rebuilding packages/updating ftp area
- simulate an upload to unstable by building on all arches in sequence
- upload packages to unstable waiting for them to be build on every arches before uploading the next one.
As usual this kind of thing should be great but the main problem, is the lack of manpower to create it...