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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday October 25 2014, @02:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the whining-is-not-efficacious dept.

A grave bug has been introduced into the "wine" package of Debian Jessie, just days before the November 5th freeze deadline. The /usr/bin/wine launch script fails with an "error: unable to find wine executable. this shouldn't happen." message.

Debian has already suffered much unrest lately over the inclusion of systemd, with threats of a fork being issued, along with the possible cancellation of the GNU/kFreeBSD port and the possible dropping of support for the SPARC architecture. After so much strife and disruption, can Debian afford to have such a serious bug affect such a critical package so soon before such a major freeze?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:16PM

    by Marand (1081) on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:16PM (#109967) Journal

    There are always bugs in Debian like this, and checking the bug report page there is already a patch. Freezing isn't something that implies "Oh no the software is broken and it's a freeze1111!", freeze just means no new versions are likely to enter the repos unless it's needed to fix some bug that can't be patched. I don't know why this is over dramatised as some sort of topic that needs detailed discussion.

    It's also worth noting that this is the entire point of the testing repository. Outside of a freeze, packages start in unstable, and if they go ten days without any massive bugs getting noticed, they get dumped into testing automatically. Other bugs might show up during testing, but they eventually go away with new packages trickling down from unstable.

    During a freeze, the testing repo stops getting those automatic new versions and goes into what is basically bugfix mode. What this means is that outside of freeze, a package might go from version 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4, but if it freezes at 1.4, updates will be 1.4.1, 1.4.2, etc., just fixing bugs in version 1.4 without adding new features.

    This is also how the stable repository works, so in essence, a freeze on testing just means it's acting like the stable repository for an arbitrary period while they prepare to make it the next stable. Debian is very strict about not adding new features to software in the stable repo, so the testing freeze is just setup for the next stable release.

    Debian's strict avoidance of version changing in stable is why its version of Firefox (iceweasel) follows the ESR release instead of the more rapidly-moving normal Firefox source: because the ESR one gets bugfixes without new features. It also kept chromium from getting into Debian for a while due to similar concerns, but that eventually got ironed out.

    It's also the reason Debian has a reputation for having outdated software. A lot of time is spent in freeze ironing out bugs before going stable, and unless you use backports, you won't see a new version beyond bug fixes, ensuring a consistent experience for the lifespan of that release.

    ---

    TL;DR: Unless this still occurs when jessie hits stable, this is a non-news example of a testing repository being used for testing. Submitter AC is likely either a troll or upset that WoW stopped working briefly and used SN's frontpage for his soapbox rant.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @05:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @05:04PM (#109988)

    I don't think this submission is a "troll". Wine isn't just one application. It's a system that allows many thousands upon thousands of other apps to run. If you break Wine, you've broken a lot of other software. It would be like the Java VM not running any software, or the Python interpreter no longer starting up. It's a very, very serious bug.

    This bug comment [debian.org] is very ominous suonding, too:

    btw:
    Jessie/Testing still has 1.6.2-8.
    So if we want all changes since then to enter Jessie (including the
    non-release-critical changes) /someone/ should upload a fixed version
    until *October 26th which is in 3 days* (or even earlier since it has to
    be accepted, ...).
    See " rel="url2html-19988">https://release.debian.org/jessie/freeze_policy.html.

    That makes it sound like a fix needs to be integrated very soon otherwise this problem could be present for a long time. Maybe it's just worded poorly, but that's how I interpret it.

    As it stands, it's now October 25 and there's still no update to that bug's tread of discussion indicating that it has been fixed.