Re: Slightly OT: Debian Community Poll

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote on comp.lang.ada:
>>> The things missing in the stable package of GtkSourceView are at least one
>>> year old. I am wondering why this key GTK package is so poorly packaged.
>
>> It is not a key GTK+ package (few other packages depend on it) and it
>> is not poorly packaged.
>
> If you build a GUI, an ability to render and edit texts is not always, but
> often, essential. Now I am not certain if other GTK parts are actual. There
> might be issues, e.g. older GTK versions had nasty problems with drop down
> windows.

That is correct but most applications that need to display text use
widgets other than GtkSourceView, like e.g. GtkTextView or simply
GtkLabel. GtkSourceView is, in fact, quite heavy and specialized. It
might be exactly what you need but that only makes it a "key" widget
for your particular application, not for all of GTK+ or GNOME.

>> If you want recent packages, you should use testing (like I do) or unstable.
>
> I will. Even GNAT GPL has shorter cycles. There should be a reason...

The reason for the 1-year release cycle of GNAT GPL is that it also
serves for the GNAT Academic Program, so its release cycle matches
that of university curricula, i.e. 1 year. The release date (May-June
each year) is, in fact, intended to make it easy for professors to
migrate to the latest version while preparing their courses for the
next year to begin in September.

The reason for the longer life cycle of Debian is to match the
expectations of conservative server administrators. They buy a new
server and install Debian N on it and do not want any changes in the
software except, reluctantly, for security bugs. 3 or 4 years later
they buy a new server, install Debian N+1 on it, migrate their data
and scrap the old server. After each stable release of Debian, they
receive one year of security support for the previous stable release,
so they can plan their server upgrades.

Since you are neither an academic nor a conservative server
administrator, as an individual user administering only your own
machine, you have no reason to lock yourself into a release cycle at
all; you can upgrade as seldom or as often as you want to. As a
developer of a future Debian package, you however must build on
unstable; hence my suggestion to use whatever you want as a user and
an unstable chroot for your Debian packaging.

Since we're now way (as opposed to "slightly") off-topic on
comp.lang.ada, I suggest we followup on debian-ada@lists.debian.org.

--
Ludovic Brenta.