Re: Debian packaging

Bram Moolenaar <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.tools.aap.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Cory Dodt wrote:

> Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> 
> >For me the most useful way is to first install a new version, use it for
> >a week or so, and then delete the old package.  If the new version
> >doesn't work well, undo the install.
> >
> >Perhaps the Debian package system already takes care of these things
> >without the need for a directory with the version number in it?
>
> Well, no.  *I* do, as the package maintainer.  Yes, you could back up to 
> a previous version of the package, but this is inconvenient in the 
> Debian system and not well supported.  Your protection is that I, as the 
> package maintainer, test (and patch when necessary) your releases, you 
> being the upstream maintainer.  The human being maintaining each package 
> is what makes Debian such a great Linux distro.  If I find bugs, I 
> report them back to you.  If they're serious enough, I don't package a 
> new version until they're fixed by one of us.

It's good to make the package work are reliable as possible.  But you
can never test for the specific situation on the target system.
Especially for incompatibilities in user files.  In the case of Aap
there could be a recipe that makes use of an undocumented feature that
no longer works in the new release.  You don't discover this until the
recipe is executed.

Unfortunately, there don't appear to be more than a few package system
that support this method of deleting the old package only after trying
out the new package for a while.  I aimed at doing this with Aap, but it
fell out of the plan because of lack of time.

-- 
From "know your smileys":
 :-E	Has major dental problems

 /// Bram Moolenaar -- [email protected] -- http://www.Moolenaar.net   \\\
///          Creator of Vim - Vi IMproved -- http://www.Vim.org          \\\
\\\              Project leader for A-A-P -- http://www.A-A-P.org        ///
 \\\  Help AIDS victims, buy here: http://ICCF-Holland.org/click1.html  ///


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