Audacity Package for Ubuntu / Debian

Adrian Knoth adi at drcomp.erfurt.thur.de
Thu Jun 11 23:44:36 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 07:07:11PM -0400, Andres Mejia wrote:

> > > pkg-multimedia, what do you think? shall we revert to the 1.2 series in
> > > unstable and keep 1.3 in experimental?
> > No, I think we should stick to 1.3 and help upstream to fix all
> > remaining bugs. Upstream is getting close to release the stable series
> > 1.4. Maybe there will be a 1.3.7 before.

ACK. Development on the 1.3 branch is slow, and development on the 1.2
is close to non-existent (no release since Dec 2006).

Get 1.3.x out, collect bugs and prepare for 1.4.

> > For people, who wants the older 1.2.x release, someone can provide these
> > packages in a PPA.
> We should instead provide both packages at once, one for the stable
> version, and one for the beta, and either make use of
> /etc/alternatives, or have the two packages Conflict with each other.

To me, it was completely new that there are people who are interested in
the 1.2 series.

Suggestion:

   * the audacity package provides the 1.3 series in both, Lenny and
     unstable. No changes here.

   * there is an audacity-old package providing the 1.2 series with a
     different executable name, i.e. audacity-1.2

   * "audacity" (the 1.3) is the default package, i.e. other packages
     depend on that one, not on the -old version.

I want to keep things going, and sticking to 1.2 or even moving 1.3 to
experimental is clearly not an option to me. (no-brainer)

Fedora, Mandriva, Opensuse and the lot all ship the 1.3 series. Debian's
surely not heading backwards and confuse the users with re-introducing
and old version, which would mean that all community hints in the forums
wouldn't apply to Debian's version, cause we're not shipping the
commonly used one.

In other words: if ever, we could provide the -old package for
convenience, but don't install it by default.

I guess all users who are in the need for that package know that they
want the 1.2 version and install it on their own.


Putting things straight: Upstream slowly fixes their 1.3 branch, and I
don't expect them to fix anything in the 1.2 series. We could easily end
up with tons of bugs nobody's ever going to fix. Providing two versions
doesn't exactly improve the situation.

Two things we could do:

  * ask upstream which version they recommend or really support. I tried
    today in #audacity, but no reply. E-Mail might work.

  * create a poll to see whether there is a real need for 1.2 at all.

If everybody is fine with 1.3 and only five users want 1.2, it isn't
worth the effort. YMMV.

If need be, call the -old package -1.2 instead. ;)


Just my $0.02


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