Tue, 05 Oct 2010

New Backports Suite created

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the availability of a new suite on backports: lenny-backports-sloppy. Please read carefully before considering using or uploading to it what this entails.

The Background

You might want to ask: What's that? Let me explain it. During the etch release discussions popped up on the backports list with two clashing groups:

• One that expected to always be able to upgrade from sarge + sarge-backports to etch without backports,
• others that wanted new versions of packages flowing in even after the release and were happy to upgrade from sarge + sarge-backports to etch + etch-backports.

The standing at that time was to accept packages that were in testing after the release, which wasn't etch anymore but lenny.

The same discussion started again before the lenny release, and given that we are facing the upcoming squeeze release we started internally to discuss how to noise down these long and tedious discussions, because both groups of people had valid opinions that shouldn't get ignored. So this is where the idea for lenny-backports-sloppy comes from.

The Change

lenny-backports-sloppy will please the group that is happy to upgrade from lenny + lenny-backports to squeeze + squeeze-backports. lenny-backports is meant only for packages from squeeze, even after the release. Technically that means it will get locked down for uploads after the release of squeeze and require manual approval (for e.g. point release update versions, or security updates that happen during the squeeze release cycle), while lenny-backports-sloppy will accept packages from wheezy. Uploading to lenny-backports will have to get approved by the Debian Backports Team after the squeeze release, just like uploads to lenny are currently approved by the Release Team.

While lenny-backports-sloppy is created already and working we ask you to not upload packages there without prior discussion with the Backports Team. This is meant to ensure that the Uploader is aware about the expectations that come along with that: The package should have a good chance to get included in the next Debian release aka wheezy, and that the Uploader is willing to look after the package in the upcoming squeeze-backports suite after the release of squeeze to ensure upgradability.

In case of questions, feel free to ask either directly on the debian-backports@lists.debian.org mailinglist, or contact team@backports.debian.org privately.

We are also pleased to announce that the first upload to lenny-backports-sloppy already happened. From now on you will be able to install Postgresql 9.0 (which is not targeted at squeeze) from lenny-backports-sloppy.

How to use

If you want to use lenny-backports-sloppy you will have to add both lenny-backports and lenny-backports-sloppy to your sources.list. Backports from lenny-backports-sloppy may depend on packages in lenny-backports.

  deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports   main
  deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports-sloppy main

About Backports

You are running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That is where backports come in.

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution. It is recommended to pick out single backports which fit your needs, and not to use all available backports.

Thanks for reading this far, and enjoy!
Rhonda in the name of the Backports Team

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