2 - Raspberry PI Community Projects

Otherwise, this distribution frequently houses important modifications to base packages, whose
integration into Unstable with serious bugs would have critical repercussions. It is, thus, a completely
isolated distribution, its packages never migrate to another version (except by direct,
express intervention of the maintainer or the ftpmasters).
1.5.2. The Unstable Status
Let us turn back to the case of a typical package. The maintainer creates an initial package,
which they compile for the Unstable version and place on the p-master.debian.org server. This
first event involves inspection and validation from the ftpmasters. The software is then available
in the Unstable distribution, which is risky, but chosen by users who are more concerned
with staying close to the cutting edge, with more up to date packages, than they are worried
about serious bugs. They discover the program and then test it.
If they encounter bugs, they report them to the package's maintainer. The maintainer then
regularly prepares corrected versions, which they upload to the server.
Every newly updated package is updated on all Debian mirrors around the world within less than
six hours. The users then test the corrections and search for other problems resulting from the
modifications. Several updates may then occur rapidly. During these times, autobuilder robots
come into action. Most frequently, the maintainer has only one traditional PC and has compiled
his package on i386 architecture (or amd64); the autobuilders take over and automatically
compile versions for all the other architectures. Some compilations may fail; the maintainer
will then receive a bug report indicating the problem, which is then to be corrected in the next
versions. When the bug is discovered by a specialist for the architecture in question, the bug
report may come with a patch ready to use.
Chapter 1 — The Debian Project
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