Re: [Gnumed-devel] Re: FreeDiams freediams_0.4.2-1_amd64.changes ACCEPTED into Debian

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 08:28:32AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:

> > It is true that to enjoy higher versions of FreeDiams, users of Debian 
> > (Ubuntu) will have to either switch to "testing" or make adjustments to 
> > their preferences just for FreeDiams.
> 
> Yes.  As I said: From a Debian perspective FreeDiams is not different
> than any other package.  We are providing a stable system and IMHO in
> a real life scenario you do not want to change your installation that
> frequently as development is working anyway.
>  
> Can you tell me any reason why FreeDiams (or GNUmed) should be handled
> differently than new versions of Openoffice.Org, Firefox, Apache,
> PostgreSQL?

In general it should not.

However, FreeDIAMS and its ilk may contain another category
of bugs which Debian didn't have to deal with yet. They are
comparable to security bugs. Call them live-threatening bugs.

If a bug is found that will, say, calculate results which
may then endanger patient's lifes if followed blindly there
ought to be some way of doing something about it.

Either pull the package from the archive and/or push an
upgrade which demonstrably contains *just this one fix* -
which I consider an important constraint and which is easily
doable by using something like git branches.

This sort of thing is rather rare and warrants manual human
consensus between authors, maintainers, and ftp-master.

Karsten
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