what's stopping iceweasel 4.0 to be in unstable.

[Mike Hommey]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 05:16:59AM +0000, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Hi all,
>  Please see the discussion at
> http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=64613 .  To put it
> simply,  while it started with the recent alioth.debian.org
> move/change handling to two hosts for better uptime and scalability
> and the resulting downtime I have been concerned seeing the stagnancy
> of iceweasel 3.5/3.6 in unstable and no move to have iceweasel 4.0 in
> unstable.
> 
> I have not seen any discussions on the mailing list so in case I
> missed something sorry.  I tried to see all the depends of
> xulrunner-2.0 (manually) by using something like :-
> 
> $ apt-show-versions -a libnspr4-0d
> libnspr4-0d 4.8.8-1 install ok installed
> libnspr4-0d 4.8.6-1 stable  ftp.us.debian.org
> libnspr4-0d 4.8.7-2 testing ftp.us.debian.org
> libnspr4-0d 4.8.8-1 sid     ftp.us.debian.org
> libnspr4-0d/sid uptodate 4.8.8-1
> 
> Except for libmozjs4d which is still in experimental all other
> packages are either in stable or testing or in sid/unstable. So is
> there possibility of maybe first having libmozjs4d first in unstable
> and then maybe in a day or two have xulrunner-2.0 and finally
> iceweasel 4.0 in unstable.
> 
> While I do not claim to know anything about iceweasel/firefox but
> whatever info. is there in general media/perception it does seem with
> their change to a chromium sort of developmental process, they would
> be more number of releases and better tested releases (or atleast that
> is the perception).
> 
> In either way that would mean that 5.0b2 (which got released recently
> and perhaps even r6 or r7 over a year's horizon) the iceweasel
> maintainers would be playing constant catch-up to upstream.
> 
> Has there been any thought as to how the iceweasel team proposes to go
> ahead in such a scenario ?

The problem is not dependencies. The problem is reverse dependencies.
More specifically, reverse build dependencies.

See this thread on the debian-release list (CCed on this list, by the
way):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/05/msg00201.html

It was decided on irc that the way forward would be to try builds for
all these reverse build dependencies, file RC bugs on those failing,
wait a week, NMU those we want to keep, RM those we don't, and then
only we can upload iceweasel 4 to unstable.

Mike