Arch Linux

blankone

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 3

Why do some packages sit in testing for so long?

apparmor and mullvad-vpn are hardly arcane packages, but they've been sitting outdated for ages. Apparmor has had multiple updates to 5.0 in the testing repo while the extra repo version is still on 4.1.7, and 4.1.8 came out a month ago. Mullvad sits in testing for about a month as well.

Last edited by blankone (Today 12:15:06)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,913

Re: Why do some packages sit in testing for so long?

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … ote_493545
https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/li … 2AFTBYWNF/

Whether or not 5.0.1 ultimately fixed those you'll have to check upstream.

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blankone

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 3

Re: Why do some packages sit in testing for so long?

Yeah the apparmor repo does say 5.x is a big change, but it still doesn't explain why 4.1.8 hasn't been pushed, or mullvad.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,390

Re: Why do some packages sit in testing for so long?

It explains it in so far that you'd have to pull (or force downgrade with an epoch) apparmor 5 from testing before it can wander into extra. Conceptually a similar thing happens on major kernel releases, were a new kernel will likely sit in testing for a while/until .1 is released and during that time stable patch releases of the stable kernel will also not be pushed to core.

And apparently as far as mullvad goes, it was tagged but not officially released yet until last week which might be a reason for it's delay of moving on from testing: https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-a … 5659797025 https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … ote_553303

Also ultimately this is a variation of rule 6 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=130138 -- there's no implied or given importance of any package nor are packagers required to hold to a timeline, if the packages in question and the updates in question are that important to you, you're free to build them against the stable system yourself.

Last edited by V1del (Today 15:41:00)

blankone

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 3

Re: Why do some packages sit in testing for so long?

It just seems counterproductive to just leave a package doubly outdated for months in the hope that the next-next version eventually becomes stable. Imagine if Microsoft had patch 10.x version of notepad but didn't issue it to users because 11.x was unstable on the Insider builds.