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Re: Unstale: Recommendation to wait with an dist-upgrade



On 01/06/2016 22:03, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
Hi David,

On Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2016 15:51:54 CEST David Goodenough wrote:
On Wednesday 01 June 2016 14:52:44 Martin Steigerwald wrote:
Hi!

In case you want to avoid an after about 10 minutes crashing plasma
session
due to ksmserver not finding a symbol in a window manager related library,
I recommend you to wait till you can get plasma-workspace, kscreen, kwin
related packages from unstable. Otherwise you need to install some
kscreen + kwin packages from experimental temporarily to get back a
working session.

You can also wait for plasma-desktop as well, Maxy just uploaded it.

Akonadi 16.04 seems to work fine, but is not yet fully completely at
16.04,
and KDEPIM packages are still to come for 16.04.

With a large transition like this it would REALY helpful to people who
follow sid (which I guess is many of the people on this list) if there was
an email saying that such an upgrade had started (there was one
where someone noted it had started this time) and then one saying
when it had finished.  Especially when the list of packages making up
KDE has changed it is really had to know when everything is in place
and therefore we can restart regular dist-upgrades.

Yes, it would be good, and still:

Again and again and again: Debian Unstable is called Debian Unstable for a
reason.

If you expect the principle of least surprise use stable. Or if its release
cycle is too slow, help on improving that or choose another distro that does
quicker release cycles.

It is exactly as easy as that.


First: The team is very small and has a *lot* of work to do. I prefer them to
get new packages in quickly. That said I am grateful for an increase in
answers to questions asked here by Maxy and Lisandro.

Second: The order in which packages appear in Sid is not predictable. Packages
may fail to build unexpectedly. And are build in different speeds and order on
different architectures.

Third: I try to help a bit, as I upgrade daily and warn about issues I find.
Other adventurous users can help as well.

Fourth: You also can offer the team your help and offer them to write such
mails for them.

Fifth: There have been mails here on the list that basically announced the
current update cycle. Actually the last I wrote in the "Yay, its coming"
thread I started. I basically announced it on the day I saw the first packages
being uploaded. So an announcement was there since on 19th of May already. And
it was really easy to pick up, I´d say.

Sixth: You can subscribe to debian-devel-changes  or for Plasma / KF5 debian-
qt-kde-ml and see any packages flowing in. On the qt-kde-ml you can basically
see them as the developers upload them. Usually it takes about 5 to 12 hours
(rough subjective estimate) for them to appear on the mirror I use so there is
some prior "warning" time and I at least have an estimate beforehand whats
coming. And Maxy usually uploads in cycles of 30 to 100 packages or so,
whenever you see such a cycle coming in, you know changes are coming.

Seventh: There can be any amount of any other disruptive updates in Debian
Sid. Do you want announcements for these as well?

8th: Even the packaging team does not know all the version dependencies. So
while its already unprectable when exactly packages come available, its even
more unpredictably what versions work well with one another and what interim
combinations may break. Things seem even to break in different ways depending
on when users upgrade, when I read experiences on this list.

I still think, yay it would be nice, but if I can choose between the team
spending time on packaging or writing mails I personally prefer packaging
*any* time.


[...]
Thanks for your consideration,


Fully agree here, and I want to thank you Martin Steigerwald for performing beyond the call of duty. I think the kind of (unpaid, voluntary) work you are doing on this list is as important for the end user as the packaging work itself. That being said BIG thank you to the Debian KDE packaging (small I gather) team, you are doing a great job and thanks to you I feel like KDE is first class citizen in Debian. Happy with this upgrade, running fine here.

Cheers !


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