[Pkg-haproxy-maintainers] Recommended strategy for running 1.5 in production

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

(Cc'ing the Debian maintainers as well)

Hi all,

On 19:28 Wed 16 Apr     , Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 07:14:31PM +0300, pablo platt wrote:
> > An official Ubuntu dev repo will also make testing easier.
> > It's much easier to use a apt-get than building from source and figuring
> > out command line options.

Actually Vincent Bernat maintains a PPA with rebuilds of our Debian 
packages from experimental, which should be handy for Ubuntu users:

  https://launchpad.net/~vbernat/+archive/haproxy-1.5

> 
> I think we're getting close to a release so we should not harrass distro
> maintainers with that *now* (but we could have done years ago). That
> reminds me that I tend not to always realize how much time slips between
> versions, and to forget that sometimes a previous version has some 
> bugs.
> 
> What I'd expect from our users is to sometimes complain loudly and insist
> for having a new dev release when the latest snapshot has become more
> reliable than the last dev release if that makes their lifes easier. A
> new version doesn't cost much (1 hour to read the changelog, write a
> human-friendly summary in an announce e-mail and update the site).

With my Debian hat on, I'd like to "complain" a bit about 1.5. Of course 
we appreciate your dedication to making HAProxy rock-solid and 
feature-complete and at this point as a user 1.5 has been pretty stable 
for me (and the new features are definitely worth the wait).

However, as Debian maintainers we probably will not replace 1.4 with 1.5 
in our main track (unstable -> testing -> wheezy-backports) until 
1.5-final is out; we would like to make sure that we will end up with a 
proper 1.5 release in Debian Jessie (and not with a development snapshot 
at any rate) that both, upstream and ourselves will be willing to 
support.

Unfortunately, this means that 1.5 currently gets less user exposure (at 
least via Debian and Ubuntu), potentially slowing down the stabilization 
process. So please, leave some features aside for 1.6 ;-)

Regards,
Apollon