Message-ID: <af117b192c0ede9250d86d5723ee80c394d4dc21.camel@cogitri.dev>
Subject: Re: adding packages to stable
From: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
To: Thomas Liske <thomas@fiasko-nw.net>, ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2020 17:11:36 +0200
In-Reply-To: <82bd62b0-ddb0-f9ea-52a1-e94e54fa2044@fiasko-nw.net>
References: <82bd62b0-ddb0-f9ea-52a1-e94e54fa2044@fiasko-nw.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello,

the procedure for adding new packages to a stable release are:

1. Make sure the package has a maintainer (if not, someone has to adopt
it)
2. Move the package to community from testing. git mv testing/$pkgname
community/ and then git add community/$pkgname && git commit -m
"community/$pkgname: move from" should do the trick for that. Keep in
mind that all {make,}depends of the package also need to be in
community or main, packages in community can't pull in packages from
testing.
3. Make a merge request

However, new packages for community only end up in the next stable
release, so in this case it'd end up in 3.13. We want to avoid adding
new, potentially not well tested packages to new releases if posssible.
As such I'd recommend you to move things you want in a stable release,
tested and can maintain to community before the next stable release.

I hope that helps,

Rasmus Thomsen

On Sun, 2020-07-19 at 16:06 +0200, Thomas Liske wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wonder if there is any policy about adding packages from edge (main
> or 
> community) to a stable branch. (In Debian this would not be allowed
> but 
> they have the backports repository which could be used for that.)
> 
> For non-binary packages (i.e. pure python stuff) it is possible to
> use 
> package pinning to use packages from edge on a stable release. But
> this 
> might break for binary packages due to linking against libraries etc.
> 
> Using edge package pinning feels to unstable for me to use them on 
> productive systems (read: running a stable release) since the
> staging 
> from edge to stable is missing. There seems to be a low chance of 
> breaking something in stable by just adding *new* packages.
> 
> 
> Example: Would a merge request adding the ifstate package to 3.12 
> accepted (and what (commit|MR) title should I use)?
> 
> 
> TIA,
> Thomas