Re: Upcoming re-releases

* Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> writes:
> > On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 06:36:10PM +0200, Devrim GUNDUZ wrote:
> >> So Debian has a patch that is not in 8.1.2? I can't believe that they
> >> are doing that -- personally I'm against to add any patch into binaries
> >> that is not in the core.
>
> > I consider it a form of preventative bug fixing.
>
> As against which, you have to consider the probability that the Debian
> patch breaks something. With a maintainer who is not one of the main PG
> developers accepting patches that haven't yet been reviewed (much less
> beta-tested) by the community, that risk seems far from negligible.

While I appriciate the core developer's expertise I don't think lack of
being a core member alone makes Martin's critique of the patch somehow
less valuable. I've also posted the patch to both -hackers and -patches
and I'd love for the community to review it.

And, to be fair, it's going into Debian/unstable and won't be in a
stable release without further testing by the Debian/unstable users
and Debian/testing users (once it propagates there). Unless there are
serious problems with it though I expect it to be in the next stable
Debian release (currently slated for the fall, iirc). It wouldn't go
into an update to the current Debian/stable as it's not a security fix.

I'm still very much of the opinion it's a bug and it's not terribly
complicated of a fix when you look at it. The patch looks bigger than
the actual change really is because of the structure references. Those
pieces aren't actually changed beyond referencing the structure variable
instead of the static variable though.

> (Now Red Hat certainly also puts in patches that aren't yet released
> upstream, but we try to avoid getting ahead of upstream patch development.)

Debian in general doesn't like to differ much from upstream and so it
would certainly be nice to have the patch accepted into *some* point
release which could be included in the next stable Debian release. It
seems unlikely 8.2 will be out with enough time for it go through
Debian's testing before the next stable Debian release.

Thanks,

Stephen