[albatross-users] Announcement: Albatross in Debian

[Andrew McNamara]

>I'm very happy to announce that Albatross has finally made its way into
>Debian unstable. As I speak, Debian mirrors around the globe are
>updating and you should be able to apt-get the package in no more than a
>few hours.

Thanks! This is great!

I briefly looked into what was involved in producing a debian package,
but was scared off, so I really appreciate your work on this.

>The packages contains the latest stable version of Albatross (1.10). I'm
>preparing to release a newer version as soon as a new stable version is
>released.

Poke poke... 8-)

>      * There is no python 2.1 version. I don't intend to supply one
>        unless there is demand for it. (And then, the only argument that
>        I buy would be that you have an existing albatross application
>        that uses some feature unique to python 2.1.)

I tend to agree - 2.1 seems to have been bypassed - I think the people who
were stuck with old applications stayed with 1.5.2, then jumped directly to
2.2.  2.2 is more stable than 2.1 without breaking too much, and I think
2.3 will prove to more stable again.

>      * There is no documentation package. This is because a known bug
>        in the dia diagram drawing program prevents generation of the
>        diagrams in the documentation. The bug has recently been fixed,
>        but it will take some time before a new, fixed version of dia
>        will be available.

Dia. Sigh.

>      * You will always get the session server and standalone
>        application server, and you can enable a system-wide session
>        server by editing the defaults file in /etc/defaults/albatross.
>        I recently merged the separate session and application server
>        packaged back into the main package because they are so small. A
>        future version of the packaging may see a different kind of
>        split.

Yes, I tend to agree.

>      * The test suite is not run at build-time. This will require some
>        rather large changes to the test suite to support both python
>        2.2 and 2.3. While it would certainly be nice to run the tests
>        automatically at build time, I do run them manually and make
>        sure they pass before releasing a package.

This is a hard choice (it should only be the doc tests that fail) -
there may be ways of solving it, but they won't be pretty. I'm a little
reluctant to make the test harness more complicated because I worry that
bugs will creep in.

BTW, I think I updated the doc tests to 2.3 output in the latest snapshots.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/